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Lot Essay
In Bodegón avec protozoaires et trous noirs, the vast canvas dwarfs the viewer. This is a still life for the age of science, for the age of the microscope, the canvas filled with the single-celled organisms of the title. Like so many traditional Bodegón paintings, this is certainly well within the realm of the organic, but is nonetheless a novel subject matter, making this a thoroughly modern re-imagining of the genre. Barceló has used mixed media in order to make the presence of these swirling entities all the more vivid and immediate, and this ensures that the protozoa of the title are all the more striking, forcing the viewer to stop and think. The fact that the rich surface of the picture itself incorporates mixed media blurs the line between the image and the represented object, taking trompe-l'oeil to a new and subversive level. At the same time, this blurring of the boundaries can be seen as the bridging of the age-old gap of representation:
"What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material. I want to try different renderings to get to the saturation of baroque still lifes. Sometimes I use the elements as a pretext to create a kind of dance inside the picture; in other words, the still life is just an excuse" (Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987-1997, exh. cat., Barcelona 1998, p. 16).
The size of the canvas in Bodegón avec protozoaires et trous noirs is itself an intense irony considering its supposed subject-matter of microscopic organisms. Barceló has gone further than to show the world as under a microscope. It appears almost landscape-like, as though the viewer is confronted with a littered seabed. Barceló has breathed life into an invisible realm of nature, taking some of the building blocks of existence and displaying them as large creatures on this monumental surface. This is at once a celebration of the hidden world of science that lies underneath life, as well as a deliberate disruption of the natural order of things. Here, suddenly, the tiny has become large, tangible, sensual, and in this sense Bodegón avec protozoaires et trous noirs is far from science or the scientific. Barceló is rattling our cages, and also rattling the cages of both science and of art itself:
"I don't have a destructive spirit; I'm just stirring things up. These days we cannot accept that things come one after another in a certain order; it's too obvious that they don't. We should alter the order so things can breathe again, and we can also change things around without anything happening. 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. This recognition is important to me" (Barceló, quoted in Ibid., p. 16).
"What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material. I want to try different renderings to get to the saturation of baroque still lifes. Sometimes I use the elements as a pretext to create a kind of dance inside the picture; in other words, the still life is just an excuse" (Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987-1997, exh. cat., Barcelona 1998, p. 16).
The size of the canvas in Bodegón avec protozoaires et trous noirs is itself an intense irony considering its supposed subject-matter of microscopic organisms. Barceló has gone further than to show the world as under a microscope. It appears almost landscape-like, as though the viewer is confronted with a littered seabed. Barceló has breathed life into an invisible realm of nature, taking some of the building blocks of existence and displaying them as large creatures on this monumental surface. This is at once a celebration of the hidden world of science that lies underneath life, as well as a deliberate disruption of the natural order of things. Here, suddenly, the tiny has become large, tangible, sensual, and in this sense Bodegón avec protozoaires et trous noirs is far from science or the scientific. Barceló is rattling our cages, and also rattling the cages of both science and of art itself:
"I don't have a destructive spirit; I'm just stirring things up. These days we cannot accept that things come one after another in a certain order; it's too obvious that they don't. We should alter the order so things can breathe again, and we can also change things around without anything happening. 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. This recognition is important to me" (Barceló, quoted in Ibid., p. 16).