Miquel Barceló with Jurriaan Benschop

Until the end of June, Miquel Barceló has an exhibition of his ceramic works at La Pedrera, the signature building of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. On the occasion, the Rail spoke with the artist, who, since his appearance in the 1970s, has been working in diverse media such as sculpture, painting, printmaking, and ceramics. Among the large-scale projects that he realized in his later career are ceramic decorations for a chapel in the Cathedral of Mallorca and a giant dome painting in the United Nations building in Geneva. In his work, Barceló evokes a sense of the timeless, and establishes a connection to earliest forms of cave painting. In his universe, making art seems a way of rooting ourselves. The company of nature and animals is essential to the artist, who shares his time between the island of Mallorca and Paris and has also lived for extended periods in a village in Mali.

Jurriaan Benschop (Rail): Currently you have an exhibition at La Pedrera in Barcelona, one of Gaudí’s signature buildings, also known as Casa Milà. Did the presence of Gaudí influence the ceramic works that you brought, or the way to present them?

Miquel Barceló: For the show in Barcelona we opened all the windows of the Pedrera. Usually they show paintings, often in dark rooms. You do not see the city outside. For my show we removed everything from the walls, opened up the windows. It has become a very light and clear space. But you remember I did this work in the Cathedral of Mallorca. There I really worked with Gaudí.

Rail: In the cathedral you made a meters high, curved ceramic wall with decorations for the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament. The iconography is based on the biblical miracle of Jesus feeding a crowd with five loaves and two fishes. It was inaugurated in 2007.

Barceló: In the beginning of twentieth century Gaudí changed the conception of the cathedral. When I made the work he was my neighbor and my partner in crime, so to speak. It was like having a long conversation with him about the space and about what is decorative art or ornament, how as an artist we can work with the sacred, with a history of centuries and with the genius loci. Mallorca is my own place, which made it very interesting. I know the place.

Rail: For the cathedral you had long conversations with the bishop. Had you been raised Catholic or in other ways religious?

Barceló: No, I have always been agnostic, but I think that is not relevant here. When you see works of Michelangelo, Donatello, or Tintoretto, you also do not think about that. It is not important if he was Catholic or Muslim or Jewish.

Rail: But I could imagine your work in general as a kind of spiritual practice.

Barceló: Probably because, if you look at the art from the caves, from Chauvet until now, 99.9 percent is religious and funerary, most of the time. Only in the last century has that changed. Now we believe art is not religious, but maybe it is too… We don’t know.

Rail: You did a lot of research into the cave paintings, looking closely into the style of the painters. There are different theories about what exactly was the drive for these people to make the paintings on the walls. What is your take? Why did they want to make the paintings?

Barceló: I think the cave paintings in Chauvet, Altamira, or Lascaux are made for exactly the same reasons that I do my paintings. It comes from the very human necessity, like poetry. You can feel the individuality, which is very interesting. It is never collective work, in the cave, you see the individual. The oldest cave paintings we know are in Chauvet, which are 36,000 years old. I was maybe ten times visiting Chauvet as I am part of the scientific committee, I went many times with the people who do research and they found the print of a hand in the wall, probably the left hand of the person that was painting, he was looking for support on the wall. Then it was discovered that his little finger was broken. Through this hand we know approximately how high was the painter who did it, something like 160 centimeters. It is like the signature of the artist. He was fantastic, you see he erased the other art to put his own art but then nobody from the other people at work on the site removed his work. It is like, say Raphael, maybe he removed Gothic frescoes to put his painting on top, but then nobody removed Raphael’s because it is so good. And that is exactly the same thing. It is fantastic to see this palimpsest of art and to see the individuality of that.

Rail: For you, this is the first painting.

Barceló: Chauvet, yes, is the first I know, the oldest one. Recently I have been working in Paris on big canvases with relief, a bit like the cave paintings, and also with charcoal and pigments as used in the cave. And the subjects are also the same, the heads of the horse, of other animals. For me, the funny question is: where is the modernity? Because it’s the same chemistry, the same pigments, and the same subjects and also the technique is very, very close. Maybe the modernity is in the canvas that we can move, which is different from a cave. But it’s very interesting. I think that leads to the definition of postmodernism, and why we make art. It is the opposite of this idea of avant-garde and art that erases the one that is made before.

Rail: You’re saying there is no progress in art; that is not something you believe in?

Barceló: There’s progress maybe in science, but not in art. In art, we are always on the same point. It is a movement. We might move very fast, but to nowhere.

Rail: When I speak with younger artists, they appear sometimes worried that their art is not contemporary. In your case I feel the opposite. If you would be worried, it would be about not being connected to the most ancient paintings.

Barceló: Yes, because we are connected. We are, even if sometimes we don’t know. A graffiti artist in the South Bronx is in contact with the artists of the Chauvet cave. Maybe he doesn’t know that. But for sure he is.

Rail: You brought up the question yourself: Where is the modernity? If you make your paintings now in Paris, do you have an answer for yourself?

Barceló: I see my generation and the art I make as part of the postmodernist movement, as it started at the end of the seventies, beginning of the eighties. Now I realize that is what I have done these last forty years. But the current art I see around seems more like a form of historicism, it comes with an alibi. More like the art pompier as it appeared in France in the nineteenth century, with a subject, to help the people in necessity, to support feminism and so on. That is the historicism. But I think my interest in the cave is part of this postmodernism.

Rail: Talking about subject matter, or the motif that is depicted, I remember when I saw your work for the first time, in Spain, I think it was in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, and in Cuenca, I was impressed by the materiality of it, the texture of the painting that spoke to me. I don’t even remember if there was a figurative motif or what exactly was depicted, but I remember the surface treatment.

Barceló: It is very important to me, the materiality of things, also maybe because we live in this immaterial, digital time and I like to feel the painting is a physical reality. I need that reality. For me sculpture and painting, or ceramics, it is almost the same, it has this material quality. Then if it is abstract or figurative, it is all metaphysical discussions, I don’t need that. For me the concept of what painting is is very large. The thing we call photography in the twentieth century is part of that. All things, like lithography, photography, serigraphy, all these are techniques of painting, right? I think of my paintings as a kind of resistance to the digitalization in a way.

Rail: But you already painted like that before the digital era.

Barceló: Yes, sure, I realize I need to see the materiality of things. Immateriality produces melancholia, I think. I escaped the melancholia, you could say. [Laughs] That produces repetition, and it paralyzes. It is not good for me.

Rail: You seem the kind of artist that goes every day to the studio, right? I heard you also like to swim, is it a similar daily activity?

Barceló: Yes, after this interview, my plan is to go to swim. We are going to run and to swim with the dogs for one hour and when it’s dark I come back home. You know it’s not only me. I remember a Spanish writer from the twentieth century who I like very much, Juan Marsé, he wrote in his journal: I wrote and swam. That’s it. That was the resumé of the day.

Rail: Is it something connected to coming from Mallorca?

Barceló: Possibly, but you know the diving and snorkeling that I do is very connected to painting. The relation you have with the world under water is the same I have with the paintings. Making them, I wait and wait, until the moment comes to act. Many years ago, in my twenties, I was a very good hunter, I went twelve to fifteen meters under the sea level. There you wait and you try not to move because you need to keep your breath. You wait for one, two minutes. And when the fish comes, pang, you shoot in nanoseconds, and that’s it. To paint is very similar. You wait until the moment that you act. In that sense it is the opposite of writing, to paint is more like one act.

Rail: You describe it as a silent space. For you it’s not like if you start a painting that you have some kind of narrative in mind, or that you follow a mental conversation about where to go, what to catch in the painting.

Barceló: There is a conversation, but without words, it takes place in silence. Sometimes I put on music not to hear my own thoughts. My art is not about ideas, or conversation. I have always tried to be quick, faster than the ideas. The ideas come after, not before.

Rail: Like this conversation. It’s next to the art.

Barceló: After. At night, maybe you think, “Oh, that’s good,” or “When it’s like that is okay.” Even if you made a mistake. But an idea is always… empty and heavy. Ideas don’t make art, ideas make books. Art is made by another thing…. Art makes art.

Rail: Do you feel as an artist close to animals? As they are so important in your work, on the vases, in the church, in your paintings, as sculptures.

Barceló: For sure, here in Mallorca I have dogs, cows and bulls. And two donkeys. I live with many animals. I feel close to them, because the animals always do the right thing. It was by instinct that I started to buy cows, donkeys, bulls, rams, when I was very young. I said to everybody, they are models for my paintings, but that is not true. I don’t need a model. Because I don’t paint with a model, but I like their company and I realize more and more that when I’m in trouble, the animals put me again on the ground. You spend one hour with animals and you know what to do. With people it’s the opposite. [Laughs] My best friends are poets, either in Mallorca, in Barcelona, or in Paris. There are some painters, some musicians, among my friends, but especially poets. We understand each other. I don’t mean to say that poets and animals are the same, but it is similar. My first exhibition in France was called Pintagossos, which means painter of dogs, because in those days, it was always the painter in the studio with a dog. And this is exactly my situation now. While we are talking, the dogs are ten meters from here, outside the door.

Rail: On the other hand, if people get violent and cruel, and they create war, people say that they behave like animals….

Barceló: That is because they do not have animals, those people. Most people talk about animals without any knowledge. I’m from the countryside. I know them.

Rail: So just by being with them, makes you synchronize, so to say, with the animals, with life.

Barceló: Yes, also in Africa, I was often in Mali where animals are very present everywhere. When I lived there, animals surrounded us, maybe more than people. The termites, the insects, the scorpions: so many different animals are very present and it is very important.

Rail: Also animals that want to eat you.

Barceló: Yes, animals that we eat and animals that want to eat us. Exactly. Well, they try, yeah? In Africa a scorpion bit me on the eye, in the nineties.

Rail: Why does a man from Mallorca go to Mali? In Mallorca you have nature around you, you have the sea, animals….

Barceló: Because in those days, for me Mali was closer to Mallorca as it was in the fifties and sixties. Mali was a little bit like the world when I was born, before tourism arrived in Mallorca, before the European Union. When I was born in Felanitx, there were no cars. It was 1957 but life was pretty much the same as in 1857, the same families and the same street. And then in ten years, it all changed like as if it was another planet. Mali was exactly like that old world, as it disappeared in Mallorca. It was very strong to find this possibility. Plus, in the eighties, when I first came to Mali, I came from New York, where the world was very crazy around me. Everybody died, my friends, you know, people of twenty-five, twenty-seven years old, they died like flies. Because of AIDS, because of drugs. Mali became like my salvation in that moment, it was a manner to survive, and also to open my eyes to a different reality. Nothing is easy in Mali, it is very hard. That was good for me in those days.

Rail: Other people would be scared to die.

Barceló: It’s easy to die in Mali, yes.

Rail: So you want to be close to the danger, maybe? Or to the possibility of death?

Barceló: For me in those days it would have been better to die in Mali by accident, than to die by overdose in New York. I needed a tabula rasa. Why are you painting? I had to ask that question. In Mali, the reality is so strong, the light is so absolute, that you do things because they are necessary. And in New York, you used to paint, just because you knew how to do it and because people just said bravo and paid you money. It was good to come back to a very simple, radical decision.

Rail: What did the people in Mali say, seeing you doing the work you did?

Barceló: I stayed in a little village of maybe three hundred people and through the years everybody got to know me. I found friends and they know my paintings. It was interesting. At some point I was doing portraits of some of my friends and I put the canvas in the baobab tree to make it like a mold, transmit the form of the baobab on the canvas. With these imprints I tried to make the portrait, and one of them asked me: how did you know my head was in this baobab? That is very nice. For me the discovery of animism was important. It is close to old Greek philosophy, it was an interesting way to see the world, in a whole different perspective

Rail: You could argue that the work you made over the years is also animistic, like you blow life into every kind of object, right?

Barceló: Maybe, but it’s not that I became animistic. In French the word refers to the idea of ame, the soul. Anima is like the soul but for the Dogon people in Mali, the literal translation is “straight.” It comes from omono. The relation to the world is direct, not through a God, not through Allah or Buddha—and that’s very interesting as a concept. They say God is the water, but it is not really a God. Animism involves the things; it’s not like in the Christian, Catholic world.

Rail: Speaking about water, in your work it seems quite important, which is probably related to Mallorca. Is water not one of the most difficult things to paint?

Barceló: I don’t know if it’s difficult but it’s a subject that I realize I come back to all the time, to paint the sea or the water. It’s fascinating because the paint is like a liquid too. You know a painting basically is water that is dehydrated. I have many paintings with waters, with storms and shipwrecks.

Rail: Water attracts you more to paint than the sky, for instance?

Barceló: Probably yes, I paint much more the sea than the sky. I have painted the desert many times because I like very much the idea of the infinity and I like the space. I like that you can count the kilometers in the painting, the metaphysics of the desert. But I come back every few years to the sea. It is funny how, after years, you realize that you paint always the same thing. I thought I painted so many different subjects but then it is always the same. The sea, the octopus, the painter in the studio. It’s funny, it’s a lesson in humility.

Rail: You could even question if it is important at all, what you paint?

Barceló: It is not. Look, Cézanne painted apples because the apples don’t move, and because an apple stays good for a while. It does not rot fast like a peach. He didn’t eat the apples, he ate grapes or other things. People often asked me why I painted bullfights, and if it was meant like a promotion of animal torture, but it is not. I always say, well, Cézanne painted apples and never ate them.

Rail: In the catalogue to the exhibition in Barcelona there is the image of a painting with three lemons, Des Citrons (2022). You wrote some lines under it, saying, “oranges, painted as lemons,” which tells us something about what happens, when painting. And also, that you have a lot of lemons around the house in Mallorca, but these ones come from painting, not from the trees.

Barceló: Yes, from art history, the models are other paintings; maybe it was Fantin-Latour, or Manet I was looking at. They belong to a series of still-lifes that are paintings about paintings.

Rail: I find it fascinating that a lot of things that you paint come from art more than looking outside or looking at nature, which is all around.

Barceló: For me, the art I see is as real as the fish I see in the sea. Probably the apples of Cézanne are more real than the apples I ate yesterday.

Rail: They last longer.

Barceló: They stay forever. The taste of the apples of Cézanne are definitive.

Rail: Talking about artists that are important to you, Joan Miró has been mentioned often, as an artist that you have known. But I would have thought that, from the Spanish artists, maybe Antoni Tàpies would be more important to you or closer to your work.

Barceló: Tàpies was very important. When I was a teenager, he was an artist who was totally different than the others. I remember in Palma there was a gallery with an exhibition of his work with a big painting in gray, with an actual cigar in the center. Then it was stolen and the gallery had to buy a new one to put on the canvas. I was very impressed by this exhibition of Tàpies; I was maybe sixteen-seventeen, it was a big shock. And later in the 1980s and ’90s, every time I was in Barcelona I visited Tàpies at his place; he was really the master. The only living painter I had this relationship with in Barcelona was Tàpies. Miró was living in Mallorca.

Rail: Important because his paintings are very material, they are like objects?

Barceló: Yes, he was very close even though there were also a lot of things we did not agree about. He was against the figurative, against the use of perspective. I like very much how he opened his eyes to the art history of the orient, to Buddhist art and Japanese and Chinese paintings. Tàpies was in Mallorca in 1991, he visited me when I just came back from my first visit to Mali. It was very nice because he said to me, “I could not do that, I cannot take a plane and go paint in Mali, I can only paint in my studio in Barcelona or in the mountain nearby.” I miss Tàpies, I miss him.

Rail: He was somebody that also would critique your painting? Or comment on it?

Barceló: A little bit. I think he did not really understand my paintings, when I made the work that was very figurative, showing the artist in the studio, that was strange to him. I think he understood it maybe later. But he was a very cultivated artist, with knowledge of philosophy, not an intuitive worker. And close to poets, like myself. I don’t like it so much when they try to make a conceptual artist out of him. I think he was primarily a painter, not like an arte-povera or political artist, I think there he is more weak. I like it when he is a pure painter.

Rail: It seems, unlike Tàpies might have thought—not really a contradiction for you—to work with figures, and also in material abstraction, it is a fluidium.

Barceló: Yes, a square is a figure, just as a dog is, or a triangle. Everything is figurative, I think that these terms are very much from the twentieth century. It does not make sense anymore now. There were figures or signs in the Chauvet cave, like a certain V shape, that they thought were early forms of writing. Only much later they found out it was a form to depict a horn. They just had to look from a certain angle to see it.

Rail: Your ideal space, for an exhibition, would be something like a cave?

Barceló: I think all the painters in history, we always think to make a cave with our own paintings, like Giotto designed his own chapel in Padua. Like Rothko did in Houston. To create a space to be inside the painting.

Rail: And this is also what you aimed for in the United Nations building in Geneva, in the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room, where you made a ceiling of paint dripping down in many colors, like stalactites.

Barceló: Yes totally, or like the feeling to be in the sea and look up. When you are underwater, you can see the reflection of the coral for instance. And you see the waves in reverse, which is fantastic, very special.

Rail: The excitement of diving, has it also to do with the danger that you could be without oxygen?

Barceló: You work with a short time frame that you have oxygen in your body. Like a painter, you know, it is always short periods. Underwater there is no gravity and that’s very nice. I think, as a painter, you work with gravity every day. When I started to work with these big walls in ceramics, for the cathedral in Mallorca, the Italian guy I worked with, tried to make a chamber without gravitation, because all my work came down, it did not hold. He said the only way to avoid that is to design this chamber, like the astronaut thing. Underwater, when diving, you avoid gravity and you’re floating, and that’s fantastic.

Rail: Your ceramics exhibition is called We Are All Greeks.

Barceló: It’s a kind of joke, a quote from a poem by Percy Shelley. A friend of mine once wrote an article about me saying “We are all Africans.” Ceramic is very old and it is also very modern and has present day technological applications. You can make bones for your body, you can make parts for the satellites; technique offers many options. Painting on ceramics, it’s very old and very modern at the same time. I like that quality.

Rail: If you were to reincarnate, would you rather be a fish, or a bison as in the cave paintings?

Barceló: A fish? I’m not sure. An octopus, maybe. I like them very much, they are very clever. The cephalopods have this capacity to make patterns with the skin, to mimic, they have a fantastic stock of images, like the memory of a phone.

Rail: They are painters without a brush?

Barceló: Yes, totally. I can spend hours looking at squid and octopus. I stopped eating octopus like thirty years ago because I read too much about that. It’s just like in Africa many people have an animal superstition, like a taboo, an animal you don’t eat. I chose the octopus and it is not a big sacrifice.

Rail: You have asked this question, while working on paintings: “Where’s the modernity?” You also said there is not really progress in art. But if you think about your own lifetime as an artist, do you feel that you are a better artist now than when you started out?

Barceló: I don’t know if I’m better, but I know better what I do now. I was for many years trying to learn something. I found this way to work with clay in Africa in the nineties. My ambition was always to do big things when I was twenty years old, but I didn’t have the technique to do that. Now I’m able to do works like a giant cave project that I am involved in now.

Rail: Do you think art-making in the end always comes from confronting mortality?

Barceló: We wait, we work with time. The subject is our life and our lifetime. I think all the painters do that. When you see Rembrandt’s self-portraits, you see a kind of seismology of his time. Then, when Picasso made his portraits of Rembrandt, I think he painted himself in the face of Rembrandt and he tried to make an exploration of all the signs of time. First he made the face of the Dutch painter. And after that he started to add the lines of time, the hair in the nose, from the ears, the wrinkles on the lips—he paints Rembrandt but it is himself; it is a kind of voodoo, like black magic. He puts wrinkles on Rembrandt to avoid himself, something like that. I don’t know, it’s just an intuition, but I think very often it is like that, because that’s what painters do. Yes, mortality is the subject.

Rail: Which artist would you choose if you were to, like Picasso, mirror yourself in the face of another artist?

Barceló: Probably it would be Picasso, because he is the first artist I had a big admiration for, and I still have. Before Picasso I remember Walt Disney whom I loved when I was nine and then at twelve I started to love Picasso until now. If I would need to do this black magic, I would do it with Picasso.

Rail: You met him in person?

Barceló: No, because Picasso died when I was twelve, thirteen years old. I met everybody of his family, Paloma, Bernard. I’m a very close friend of his grandson, it’s important for me.

Rail: As a Spanish artist, it seems inescapable.

Barceló: For many reasons. Also because for me it’s the model of the painter who does all kinds of things. I do etchings, lithography, ceramic, books, watercolor—even more than Picasso probably.

Rail: You are like an octopus going in different directions.

Barceló: Yes, with many legs and changing, a polymorph. That’s a good definition of my work.