Miquel Barceló: “I have always felt European and now more” | Culture

The hairs as escarpias, as if he himself was one of the sea bugs of that world underwater where he spends hours diving whenever he can. The alert look, curious, tremendously young, with a point of irony that sometimes seems shy. We summon ourselves with Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, 68 years old) at the Elvira González Gallery, where he exhibits until next Saturday Flowers, fish, bulls, A tour of their most recurring themes. Painter, cartoonist, sculptor, ceramist and performer scenic, the most relevant Spanish artist and greater price at the international level, has a long relationship with the country and for almost four years his drawings frame the Letters to the Director. In this framework of trust this talk occurred, more than an interview, after sealing a new commitment.

Ask. On the 40th anniversary of El País you said you did not remember if you had bought the first number of the newspaper in 76, but that you remembered buying the newspaper at that time. And until today.

Answer. I remember even walking far in Paris to buy the country. I keep reading it on paper every day, especially in Mallorca. I really like the periodic object. It is very painter. I use it a lot to do collage, to cut, to draw on. One thing that I have done all my life is to draw on the photos, that of putting mustaches (to the faces). Drawing about the photos is a form of comment, isn’t it? It is done almost without thinking.

P. You say that you prefer to read on paper because you retain content.

R. When I started traveling through the Himalayas and to make great walks, all weight was too much. I started taking the books on an iPad. But I realized that I forgot what I had read. I read James Salter’s novels and they forgot. Then I read them on paper again and now I can tell you whole fragments of memory. I talked to a neuroscientist in Paris and told me yes, that the printed one stays in the brain. The screen leaves a fragile and passenger footprint, and for me the memory is essential. Knowledge comes to us for the printed word.

I am little interested in what can be said. If you can say it is not necessary to paint it “

P. Now that the country is about to turn 50, you take the relay of Eduardo Chillida, whose work has been, since 1984, the award we delivered in the Ortega and Gasset, and you have made us the enlightened hand engraving that we are going to deliver as of this year.

R. Know? I met Chillida when I was very young and immediately adopted me. I had that look … Look that our jobs were very different, but we had immediate empathy. Of course, it is a great honor to follow him and be able to make an award that in this complicated world represents what the Ortega y Gasset award represents.

P. We are very excited because it was a very important relay. But what means for you that a work of yours hangs in the house of a journalist who is playing life in a country for telling what happens.

R. That is why I did a work that contains many works, which is not a unique image, but polymorphic, which you can look for many times. I wanted me to have that concentration. It had several versions. The first was a ball like a Mapamundi, like an antitrofeo, but ended up being the same in an engraving with more colors. It has to be an award. It is complex, but it is not bleak.

P. Why do you baptize him like Tripe?

R. Because a bit everything it represents is inside. I was trying to make a black pudding and I realized that in the villages of Burgos that I know they call Mondongo to what the black pudding contains. I liked it because it is that kind of combination of many things that is an agitated world. And I really like how the word sounds. In Latin America it also has another connotation. They are like calluses. It seems to me a very Hispanic title.

P. About the agitated world. You have stopped going to Mali for war and terrorism, and now war drums sound everywhere. How are you living it?

R. With perplexity and with restlessness. Every time you open the phone you expect a real image of real. I know they have always happened, but it is now exponential. There is also the suspicion that everything is an atrocious manipulation.

P. That we do not know the game we attend.

R. That is. And what you see is that there are many tahúres.

P. Does it influence your work?

R. I am quite porous to the world. I don’t live at all isolated. When he lived in Mali, he always had radios with short wave to capture the news. So I am aware. I do not know if that has a direct influence on what I paint because I do not comment on what happens in the world, but marks my way of being in the world.

P. You are a universal artist but you express yourself fundamentally in Catalan, in Spanish and French. Do you feel Europe now that being European is questioned?

R. Always, and now maybe, because I think it makes more sense. I went to France even when I needed a passport and did not give me because I had not done the mili. I have always felt European, by intuition, as a painter, because you make your homeland with the paintings you like. Europe is a cultural field that I understood immediately. I have lived in New York and a lot in Africa, a little in Asia and recently in Australia because my wife is from there. And I go to Australia as European and as Mallorcan, no doubt. Now it seems very vindictable by Europeality. It seems to me the only hope of Europe: to impose itself as a cultural and thought field. We will not win with another brand that is not this.

P. Do you see it at risk?

R. Yes, because it is very threatened. For those tahúres.

Having the opportunity to collaborate in the reconstruction of Notre Dame is a luck and an honor ”

P. Tahúres who win at the polls. The world, and particularly the western world, seems determined every 80 years to look at the abyss. As if we had not learned anything.

R. That of Marx that the story is repeated in the form of a farce seems literal. Almost with the same characters, the details change but the drama is the same. And we continue to give us garrotazos. Giving garrotazos especially to the poor.

P. You are preparing tapestries for Notre Dame. Can you tell us some of those tapestries?

R. I was in Paris when I burned Notre Dame. My son called me and we went out, was bleak. Notre Dame’s ash fell in my study. I have never been very believer, but it seemed to have the opportunity to collaborate in reconstruction was a luck and honor. And that’s what I am. First with the Noah of Noah’s ark, I am quite advanced. We do it with the Royal Tapestry Factory of France, which has not stopped since the 16th century and make gigantic tapestry, six by eight meters, although mine are great but not so much.

P. And after Noah’s ark?

R. Isaac’s sacrifice, Elijah with the fire car, which is fantastic, and the passage of the Red Sea. But my Noah’s ark is very modest. It is a kind of lute with a sheep, a dog, a cat and a lamb. You do not make a catalog of all the animals in the world, you save your life.

P. When one is Miquel Barceló and the mold is so powerful, can one no longer get out of it or are it willing to break the mold? To investigate, to make mistakes.

R. You have to be wrong every day, and at about mistakeing I am a specialist. Not on, but it is normal to do things that hardly go well. It is a paradox because something else you did not pretend.

P. What causes you curiosity? What surprises you yet, apart from your recurring themes?

R. In the books I always find surprises. Things that overwhelm me. Now I am reading Juan Manuel de Prada’s book, which seems fantastic. Not only new things, because the world is a repetition of stories. I am increasingly put in prehistoric art. I am going to see caves more and more. That is something that I have learned late.

P. Between the modern and the archaic, where do we place Barceló?

R. Is that the archaic is the most modern. Many times I have had the feeling that I was glowing backwards. It is an choice, also an intuition. The most radically modern things are things that are there before we are able to say them. I am little interested in what can be said. If you can say it is not necessary to paint it.

P. What thought causes artificial intelligence, to think that there are artists who are already using it?

R. I plan to use it. Like photocopy. I remember that when the video arose they said that I was going to end the cinema and when the photograph arose, that it would end the paint, but degas photos and used them for their paintings. Of course, the name is ugly: artificial intelligence. It will adapt, like any tool. Governance is needed because you can cheat, even if you don’t have to be afraid. I have not yet told him “Pint me a picture with my profile”, but because I like to do things. I like things that happen, and that will not happen anymore, because they cannot be repeated.