Miquel Barceló, Madrid

Spanish artist Miquel Barceló has homes in Majorca, Paris, and Mali. This triangle of influences – his birthplace, his adopted home of France, and his fascination with Malian art – greatly informs his ever-changing style and approach to creativity.

Barceló has a few things in common with a Spanish master of times past: Picasso. Like Picasso, Barceló is interested in creating new forms. He works under a number of disparate influences, drawing inspiration from Baroque master Velazquez and American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock.

In synthesizing his influences, Barceló looks to forge new modes of aesthetic expression. As a former member of the Spanish avant-garde group Taller Lunatic, Barceló worked to destroy near a century’s worth of “isms” in order to form a new artistic idiom.

Also like Picasso, Barceló is influenced by African art. While African masks influenced Picasso’s fracturing of forms in his seminal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Barceló paints traditional European themes – landscapes and portraits, for instance – under the influence of a less literal, more mythological African art.

The Majorcan’s work has a gauzy quality, as though it comes from an alternate, more ethereal reality. His subjects are often ensconced in an otherworldly haze. This dreamlike quality can be attributed to the artist’s preference to paint from memory, rather than sketches or studies. Barceló allows the real and imagined to coexist peacefully in the world he spins through his art.

All of this talk of Picasso, and Barceló’s work looks nothing like the past master. Yet nothing could be more appropriate: as Picasso is arguably the most revolutionary visual artist since the Renaissance, so too is Barceló working in his own way to reinvent what we see when we look at art.

Miquel Barceló can be seen at Caixa Forum Madrid until 13th of June 2010.

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by William Gish
Gloobbi Art
Image: Miquel Barceló’s “La travesía del desierto,” 1988.

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