26/01/2013 - 27/03/2013
MANIFESTO DE BARRO. Miquel Barceló. Otoño 2012
translated from Galeria Elvira Gonzales's site.
While waiting to see the Barcelo' exhibition I wanted to share his words. Remember these are the words of an artist (not just bad translation !!)
"I once wrote that I started working with clay because in Gogoly-Sangha (Mali) the wind wouldn't let me paint. Surely it was like that, but more surely is that with this clay I didn't do anything but keep on painting.
Like with my paintings I started with an old potter in Banani, who taught me where to get the best clay and how to prepare it. After mixing it with camel and donkey dung and bits of broken pots jars, you wedge this body (smelly mass) and let it ferment and work it again, you achieve a certain plasticity-nothing compared to what you can buy, that is soft and flexible like plasticine-so you can start modeling.
The first piece in dogon clay was a skull onto I wanted to apply two big ears.
Given the appalling ugliness of the result, I replaced the ears for a long pointed nose, a bit like my nosebut longer ... I realized it was Pinocchio when, between the drying and firing (rudimentary) the head size was reduced by fifteen percent.
That was the evidence -and that is usually the case in all my works, whatever the material-that the long nose is the lies persist death. That told me a woman and I remember I do not usually seek explanations beyond the title, that could otherwise perfectly have been amb Cap de nin llarg nas (boy head with long nose)
When I was working on the ceramic skin that cover a chapel of Palma's catedral it became clear that this material was just another of my pictoric materials, even in the way I create the work, with punches and slabs-also with brushes, drippings and drops- 4 to 10 square meters, like Tiepolo like Giotto, like the painter in Altamira or the Pileta cave, meter by meter, day by day. The only authenthic measure is our own life. One comes to realise this. So, terracotta, this that we call ceramic, like the generic of painting, like acetilsalicílic acid is for Aspirin.
I always think of Chauvet's owl, traced with the index finger on the surface of the soft mud that covered then the walls of the cave. 25 seconds, maybe 27that it was it took the Master of the stunted little finger (that was his name) to draw the powerful curve of the head, slightly sunken in the wings closed with energic vertical lines. The two upstanding ears and the two points that look at us from the future. This great masterpiece is made of clay, mud, slime Terracotta, dry soil: like Masaccio like everything."
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