Miquel Barceló

“As in bullfighting, I believe one doesn’t paint with ideas. The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction with ideas even, generating ideas. This is why such silent artforms spawn so many words. This is where painting and bullfighting resemble each other, in the verbosity which accompanies them, as though their own silence was so unbearable that it needed pasodobles and infinite pages. Exorcisms for the bedazzled.” (Miquel Barceló in Exhibition Catalogue, Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miquel Barceló 1987-1997, 1998, p. 113)

Steeped in both social and art historical tradition, the bullfight has almost come to symbolise the Spanish people and their civilisation. Condensing the country’s culture and dramatically revealing its contrasts, excesses and mysticisms, the spectacle of man doing battle with nature, absolving himself in it, taming it and finally overcoming it seems to go the heart of Spanish existence and tradition. In turn, the bullfighter, or ‘Torero’, is seen as the heroic upholder of these virtues. Many great Spanish artists, from Goya to Picasso, have attempted to tackle the bullfight in their paintings, but nowhere has the physicality and presence of these themes been more pulsatingly depicted than in Barceló’s series of ‘Toros’.

Following two years of virtually ceaseless travelling to, from and around Africa, the summer of 1990 found Miquel Barceló returning to his roots in Mallorca. His unending desire for cultural adventure and experience had drawn him away from the intellectual conformity of his Western origins and had taken him around the globe throughout the late 1980s towards places of extremity, uncertainty and insecurity.  However, it was his return to his homeland, carrying this rich new visual vocabulary which inspired him to take on the most historic of all Spanish cultural icons, the Corrida or bullfight, in a series of works which are now widely recognised to be his most important. During this period he spent a lot of time visiting bullfights with his dealer, Bruno Bischofberger and his great friend and fellow painter, Julian Schnabel.

If both Picasso and Goya were drawn to the subject matter as a reflection of society, Barceló was drawn to the raw power of the spectacle. In the actions of the Torero, he saw a direct and dramatic parallel with the role of the artist in society. In 1912, Picasso commented about Bullfighting that “It is rare to find an art that is so intelligent about itself” (in John Richardson, A life of Picasso, Vol. II, London 1996, p. 242). By drawing comparisons between art and bullfighting, he was aligning two of the great traditions in Spanish life. Barceló went one stage further by drawing comparisons between the acts themselves. Barceló has often spoken about the importance of the presence of his painting being more real than the reality itself, and his desire to achieve an existence for the work which mirrors that of its depiction, a philosophy which he has termed a ‘living picture’.

Exploding into view, with the raw visual bravado and choreographed compositional energy of a torero taming his bull, En Los Medios oozes with the spectacle of the subject of its depiction. The literal translation of the title is "in the middle", and in Bullfighting terms, this refers to the point at which the Torero is left totally exposed to the savagery of the bull. Without any form of protection, this is the point when the contest enters its most critical phase and the Torero can show his true mastery. In En Los Medios, one can visualise the artist as the Torero in complete solitude, battling with his materials. Just as the bullfight is invariably a tragedy in three acts, one can find a similar ritual in Barceló’s painting. The preparation of the canvas is followed by the most intense period in which he violently attacks the composition, working and re-working, wrestling with the form and construction of the media he is applying. Here he offsets the bulbous almost ceramic feel of the exterior of the ring with the flattened circularity of the interior which he massages into place in a manner reminiscent of Antoni Tàpies’ ethereal sandy surfaces. Just as the bullfighter is jolted back and forth and adjusts his positioning in relation to the bull, so Barceló engages in a frantic push and pull between the addition of natural material and the outburst of controlled expression, between natural, wild form and intellectual content which finds its ultimate ‘truth’  in the realised image. What results is a masterpiece of ‘total composition’, which finds Barceló at the pinnacle of his career, employing his unique cultural experiences to penetrate the depths of symbolic form and create a poignant metaphor for the human condition, past and present. Then, the in final act , the brushwork echoes the choreography of the Torero’s footwork, as he lays the act of painting to rest, allowing its spirit to break free.

Offering itself like the desolate scene of a battle which has passed, the hard-won, almost sculpted circumference of the eliptical arena contains a sun-drenched, arid flatness which is completely at odds with the fizzing rays which emanate from its hearth. And there, just below the centre of the composition, the torero is marked out by the scarlet glow of his outstretched cape with the head of the jet black bull buried deep within. Miniaturised in the context of the stadium, the grandeur of this act is somehow emphasised by the spectacle of its context and the fact that we, the viewers are watching from a God’s-eye perspective.