MIQUEL BARCELÓ | 1/2 Grand Melon

Acquavella Galleries, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is slightly lighter and the yellow are brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some light wear with an associated minute speck of superficial loss to the upper right corner tip. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Wonderfully textured and vibrant, ½ Grand Melon is quintessentially Barceló. Executed in 2014 the present work attests to the Spanish painter’s original and instantly recognisable visual language; rivulets of paint form the insides of the melon, sensuously falling across the composition’s diagonal. Quick brushstrokes of golden yellow delineate the fruit, enveloped by crimson and coral washes that pulsate and make the composition reverberate. Born in Mallorca, Miquel Barceló has always been an admirer of the Spanish tradition of the Bodegón, or the Still Life. Great masters such as José López Enguídanos, Juan Sánchez Cotán, and even Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso have influenced his work heavily, but instead of focusing on ways of representing his subject matter like his predecessors did, Barceló seems fixated in matter and texture, enjoying paint’s tactile properties. Indeed, his art falls in line with what the Viennese art historians call the ‘haptic’, relating to a heightened sense of touch, which is indeed palpable in ½ Grand Melon’s complex combination of different texturing and sculptural layering of paint. Barceló’s raw approach to painting seems to combat the highly conceptual nature of contemporary art. His body of work not only harks back to the origins of painting, but to a pre-historic time when nature was untouched by man.

Throughout his career Miquel Barceló has led a nomadic lifestyle, which has taken him to destinations as far flung as New York, the Himalayas and multiple countries throughout Europe and West Africa. These itinerant tendencies ensure that each of his works are rich with material, fragments and organic matter sourced and archived from his varied collection of travels.

A different sense of the material is present in Barceló’s work, here in ½ Grand Melon too; a sense of the passing of time, of the ripe piece of fruit that is being presented decomposing, slowly decaying before the eyes of the viewer. Indeed, the illusion that is created is precisely what the artist is interested in, as he has explained “my paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact” (Miquel Barceló cited in: Exh. Cat., Saint-Paul, Fondation Maeght, Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, 2002, p. 98).