Two quotes open this book. One from Luis de Góngora: “Beautiful owner of my life.” The other, from the author himself: “I have never worked, I have deceived myself every day of my life with my painting.”
Miquel Barceló, one of the most international and sought-after figures in Spanish art, has generated an abundant bibliography, including the biographical approach Porque la vida no sufficient (2012), by Michael Damiano, and had already published some of his “notebooks” .
The volume that has just appeared in France, with the title, in Spanish, De la vida mia (Mercure de France publishing house) is offered as “a journey through the life and work” of the painter. A kind of thematic autobiography where the reader will find “colors and earth, objects, faces, fish, fruits, sand, animals, caves, books, objects, a rhinoceros. Also the sea, childhood, the Mediterranean, a body and its memory, a child and its boat, a painter in different workshops”, in the words of the editor Colette Fellous.
The volume, abundantly illustrated, contains comments by the artist, transcriptions of hitherto unpublished notebooks, conversations with Fellous herself, works, notes and photos. Galaxia Gutenberg will publish it in Spanish
One, who has followed the Mallorcan’s career from its beginnings, would say that, without being exhaustive, it is today the most recommended book to approach his personality and his work, both with an echo that is both primitive and very culturally sophisticated, and with an adventurous vital tone.
The promised journey starts from Felatnitx, “that when he was a pretentious young man Felanietzsche wrote” and that in 1957, the date of his birth, was very similar to the town of 1757 and 1857, while by 1982 nothing was similar and had changed more “in twenty years than in two centuries.”
The most famous neighbor was the cyclist Guillermo Timoner, six-time track cycling world champion and whose legs “could be compared to a 9-jota ham from Teruel.”
His mother, Francesca Artigues, practiced classical plein air painting and took it to the countryside with her friends. The large family house smelled of oil paint.
His teacher Jaume Rosselló Cándido taught him tricks of the trade such as hanging a stone between the three legs of the easel so that it would not be blown away by the wind, and to draw with charcoal not with the tip but with the entire piece, to achieve thickness and achieve a only gesture “the movement, the line, the light and the shadow.” He also made him read Franz Kafka.
His father, with a broken nose, tall and blonde, captain of the town’s soccer team, with whom for long and painful years “we had very bad relations.” But first he taught him the names of the trees, the birds, the fish that were caught and those that were not caught. Towards the end of his life they were very close again.
He was a man of few words; he reminded her of Frankenstein. “He never left the island. While for me, the island has expelled me and then made me return.”
The weight of the land of origin is often visible here. We see here the trinxet, a curved knife that comes from the Arab cutlass; When Chopin and George Sand arrived in Mallorca, the peasants still wore it on their sashes. Eating ensaimada, as I did as a teenager to soften hangovers, has something coprophilic, because they seem like “a lot of shit.”
In a photo he appears making sobrasada, and he says that sometimes he spreads paint with a knife as if it were this pork stuff. Arròs brut is one of the few dishes that he cooks successfully. “A little bit of everything is mixed,” as happens in many of his paintings. “An edible world. The world like a soup.”
From the age of fourteen he had a boat, an old wooden boat that filled with water. “The smell of rotten squid, fishing instruments, sea water and diesel, this mixture continues to produce an effect of absolute joy on me. More than any known drug.”
He has always practiced scuba diving. Diving, he points out, is like painting, and for a long time he painted directly standing up, on top of the canvas. “The painting is on the floor; Like on a seabed, I go in and out. In Mallorca, my painting days, when they are perfect, I always end at the sea.”
He remembers about Barcelona in the 70s that it allowed “a more supportive life, people lived with little. Then everything changed, with the marchers’ dance.” Famous since he was 25 years old after being selected for the Documenta magazine in Kassel, at a certain moment “I felt the need to leave, it was something almost mystical, I wanted to cleanse myself of something, I don’t know how to explain it.”
After a trip with Javier Mariscal to Portugal, they buy a Land Rover, fill it with pictorial material and leave for Africa: first Morocco and the Sahara, then they continue to Gao, in Mali, which they find so beautiful that they stay nine months. Mariscal returns to Barcelona and Miquel rents a house to live and paint.
“When I arrived in Dogon country it was a revelation. They gave me a piece of land next to a water source. He used caves as workshops. Everything took on a new meaning in my life. “I understood other things and I understood them in a different way.” He felt something very special. “A great set, a family space. Each stone has a double meaning. Each thing is something else. (…) My painting was nourished by all that. I must have read dozens of volumes of Dogon ethnology. The treatises on secret languages, the studies of cosmogony. And always the presence of the animals that live with men, that reminded me of Mallorca.”
In De la vida mia, friends like the healer Abigou appear. When the gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger goes to visit him for two weeks, he hits his head because the Dogon doors are low. Abigou applies overlapping crosses of spider webs, which heal him. He spoke “in a low and sinuous voice about animist questions and in a sing-song tone about everything else.”
African unforeseen events affect the creative task. “At first he cleaned and removed the dust, which infiltrated everywhere. Until I realized that dust is a treasure, it creates a very interesting material that I fixed in my paintings.” On one occasion he went on a long trip along the Niger River and left the paintings at home. On his way back, the termites had made holes in them. “I was about to cry until I realized that his holes made the paintings better. I started working with termites. He would put paper on the termite nests and attract them with moisturizing cream, which they like. “I invented a technique I called ‘xylophagy.’”
He slept with the termite paintings nearby. Scorpions feed on them, and one night a scorpion stung him in the eye. A terrible pain; He believed that he was losing it and that he was going to remain blind in one eye. Luckily he had stung him in the tear area and not in the retina, he saved his eye.
The book covers the development process of some of his best-known large projects, such as the chapel of the cathedral of Palma and the vault at the UN headquarters in Geneva, the realization of which was like “urinating towards the sky”, “painting towards high and then walk on the painting as one walks on water.” The result, “a marbled grotto where those who sit below never see the same thing.”
Barceló records his readings. In school, he memorized the first pages of Don Quixote, followed by The Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Verne, Poe, Kerouac… Soon cursed people like Rimbaud, Nerval, Lautreaumont entered, and already in the 70s Borges, Burroughs, Pessoa , Nabokov, Joyce, Bowles, Conrad…
Also classics like Lucretius, Schopenhauer, Saint Teresa, and a compulsive era of detective novels. This reading passion was recorded in his famous library paintings.
He has often visited grottoes of all kinds, “I feel good in them. Cavers teach me a lot, I like being with them. There is a greater presence of animals than humans in my painting. In Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira, it is also the animal that has all the power, we admire the strength of the mammoths, the speed of a lion, the beauty of all those extraordinary animals. Men, when they appear, have the form of ectoplasms, ghosts, caricatures.” From these visits he concludes that “there is no progress in art, it takes different forms following each era but it is the same emotion, the same need.”
A fundamental cultural conclusion that is accompanied by others such as the following: “Art is not the reflection of life, but a way of life, a very strange way of life, but…”.
“Painting is a drive that completely captures you. You don’t know where you’re going. You get completely lost and end up doing what you had forgotten or what you wanted to do without knowing how to get there. A miracle that reproduces itself in an always different way. It is something primitive, essential. I felt all of that when I was painting next to my mother, when I was twelve.”
“More than painting what I see, I see what I have already painted, I recognize things. In a certain way I paint them before seeing them.”
