Miquel Barceló

Fabien Fryns Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection, Madrid
Galería Barbié, Barcelona
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the highly textured surface apparent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are two spots of media accretion above the centre on the left edge and a tiny speck of paint loss to the right of this. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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"What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material...Sometimes I use the elements as a pretext to create a kind of dance inside the picture"
The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Barcelona, Museu d'Art Contemporani, Miquel Barcelo 1987-1997, 1998, p. 16

Darting from abstraction to figuration, the highly textured and vibrant surface of Potirons Avec Bouquet de Fleurs No.2 is an exquisite example of Miquel Barcelo's unique rendering of the traditional still life genre. His wholly individual artistic process is attributed to his impulsive and intuitive response to paint. The title describes a bouquet of flowers with pumpkins that are barely visible in the picture plane but are referenced through his robust palette of burnt orange and sunflower yellow. The objects simultaneously dissolve and emerge from the surface teeming with rich organic impasto. Bouquet de Fleurs No.2 is a painting of immense tangible presence, indeed the physical efforts of its creation are clearly made manifest.

Having travelled extensively across the world throughout the 1980s, fulfilling his desire for cultural adventure, diversity and life-enhancing experiences, Barceló returned armed with a rich new visual vocabulary. West Africa left the strongest impression on the artist, notably the magical qualities of its light and multifaceted landscapes. The freedom of these explorations was made immediately apparent by his use of diverse materials and pigment. These new discoveries were to remain a continuous source of inspiration throughout his oeuvre. Barceló would also return to some of the great themes of classical painting, notably the Still Life that grounded his investigations at an early stage, but from which he would only extract the bare fundamentals from which to continue his individual investigations. He explained, "I'm not trying to break with tradition, but simply to put myself within it and to be coherent. I don't have a destructive spirit; I'm just stirring things up...We need to look again at painting in order to draw out a new series of readings. Tradition is not only linear and there isn't an evolutionary process towards something better." (Barceló cited in Ibid)

Bouquet de Fleurs No.2 is a raw and theatrical manifestation of Barceló's collective investigations into art history and his Contemporary surroundings. The topographical accumulation of the landscape surface has an existential edge that celebrates the material evolution and reality of the painting through the intervention of the artist.