Mallorcan artist Miquel Barceló has been pleasing the multitudes since the unveiling of his glorious chapel in Palma’s cathedral back in 2006. Inspired by the miracle of the loaves and fishes, he fashioned a vast ceramic tableau of cracked mud, skulls, bursting fruit and wriggling sea creatures.
“Creating a piece of work that envelops the spectator is the ambition of every artist,” says Barceló, who has fashioned an extraordinary ceramic tableau depicting the miracle of the loaves and fishes, spreading out like a skin over the walls of a chapel within Palma’s great Gothic church. “On this occasion I’ve been able to realize that ambition. If you stand at the foot of the wall where I portray submarine life, you’re standing where I’ve spent hundreds of hours under water.”
For four long months in 2003, Barceló scarcely came up for air. As a chilly spring gave way to a sweltering summer, the artist was submerged in his studio south of Naples, clambering over scaffolding, pummelling, beating, moulding, transforming the clay into a remarkable triptych representing the biblical miracle. On the left is the life-filled sea, on the right the land blessed with an abundance of crusty loaves and over-ripe, splitting and bursting fruit, and in the centre a spectral figure of the wounded, risen Christ.
The process began when Barceló was offered an honorary degree from the University of the Balearic Islands. The artist had enjoyed a meteoric rise. Initially influenced by Pollock, by 25 he had made it at both the Sao Paulo Bienal and the prestigious German art fair Documenta. Then came exposure at the Venice Biennale and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, both in 1984. By 2000, when he was approached about accepting the degree he was one of Spain’s most celebrated living artists.
His response was that he’d gladly accept but would also like to do something in his native Mallorca. A retrospective show in the cathedral was then proposed. The bishop, Teodoro Úbeda, soon commissioned the artist to make some new gargoyles, before deciding to offer him the job of transforming the entire chapel of Saint Peter.
Fish and the wonders of the deep have populated the artist’s imagination and work since the beginning of his career, during which he has repeatedly and effortlessly captured the fluidity, energy and mystery of the sea.
With gaping eyes, the fish peer out from the distorted, watery depths. They cruise, wriggle and writhe, flap, dart, and dive among the rocks and along the seabed; others come swirling down in great, teeming shoals from the distant, unquiet surface. At the bottom, tossed into the maelstrom, surrounded by squirming eels and submerged deep in the pulsating composition, is the viewer.
To achieve this miracle, Barceló improvised and invented new techniques. “When I started out, I made a giant octopus using bakery utensils I’d never used before. I made the tools I needed: I used kitchen utensils; I used one that minces meat. I didn’t even know what some of them were originally for. I made lots of loaves of bread though they were more like blobs than bread until one day I realized I had to dry the mud. With the help of a hair dryer the blobs were transformed into bread. The power of clay to transmute into meat, bread and fish is astonishing.”
And, considering the subject matter, supremely apt.
