Miquel Barceló

"I like the phenomenology of painting to resemble that of nature. At the beach…I watched the tides. When the tide was out the sand would be full of crabs and things, and people came with buckets to pick up what they could find. I went with buckets of paint, which was funny, because it was the same thing" (Barceló in Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Miquel Barceló, 1999, p. III).

In 1984, Miquel Barceló was preparing his first solo exhibition with the Galerie Bischofberger in Zürich, having met his now dealer the year before at an exhibition of his work in Paris. The present work, Feu, Poisson, Pieds, executed in this year, is from a series of paintings, which revolve around a number of important motifs that were to become key to Barceló’s pictorial vocabulary. The most obvious of which were his interaction with the open air, the sea and the extremity of the land’s edge.

His increasing artistic confidence inspired by the events of this year is manifested in Feu, Poisson, Pieds through the presence of the artist himself, generally pictured alone, and as in this painting, confronted by the dark mass of nature that surrounds him. Unlike his other works of this period, the figure of the artist has been greatly fragmented here, represented solely yet effectively by a pair of legs and massive feet that emerge from the bottom left hand side of the composition. The sublime atmosphere created by the dark shadows of dusk that sweep over the crashing waves are accentuated by the bright lapping flames of the roaring log fire on the right. A griddle pan with a cooking fish and a discarded fishbone unite the two halves of the composition and provide a personal narrative to the work. As such, Feu, Poisson, Pieds shows the artist in a Romantic moment of pensive solitude where companionship is found only in the surrounding land and water.