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Lot Essay
‘There is something about this particular cave that goes beyond what we are able to understand... in Chauvet, there is something that escapes us; a relationship between man and his paintings that we also cannot grasp, that sort of deep empathy with the animal.’
– Miquel Barceló
Scattered animal heads slip and surge across the rich impasto surface of Miquel Barceló’s Animalari (Renifleurs), 2010. Shadows scamper in canvas’s dips and hollows, surging past patches of warm gold. Animalari (Renifleurs) evokes the Palaeolithic cave paintings of Chauvet, which have long served as inspiration for Barceló: ‘[Cavemen] were in total empathy with the animals. They depicted the animals as if they knew them. They spoke the language. We don’t understand that anymore; we don’t know it. When you look at those lions, each has an age, a name, a history, a life, as if it were a group portrait by Rembrandt, where everyone had his station’ (M. Barceló interviewed by Olivier Zahm, Purple, no. 24, Fall/Winter 2015, n. p.). Animalari (Renifleurs) seems to traverse an incomprehensible expanse of time, the very origins of humanity brought to the present, and Barceló’s animal heads are an ancestral communion. With its subtly variegated tones and thoughtfully textured surface, there is a dream-like tranquillity to Animalari (Renifleurs), the poetic flow of time and memory. These traces of time are central to Barceló who describes his painting practice like the marks left in the sand after a bullfight: ‘my paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact. The picture object is a bit like the sand of the arena, a sort of detritus of what took place there’ (M. Barceló quoted in Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, exh. cat. Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2002, p. 98). With its intensely physical surface, Animalari (Renifleurs) seems to be held in time and with his sculptural, expressive brushwork, Barceló sets them free.
– Miquel Barceló
Scattered animal heads slip and surge across the rich impasto surface of Miquel Barceló’s Animalari (Renifleurs), 2010. Shadows scamper in canvas’s dips and hollows, surging past patches of warm gold. Animalari (Renifleurs) evokes the Palaeolithic cave paintings of Chauvet, which have long served as inspiration for Barceló: ‘[Cavemen] were in total empathy with the animals. They depicted the animals as if they knew them. They spoke the language. We don’t understand that anymore; we don’t know it. When you look at those lions, each has an age, a name, a history, a life, as if it were a group portrait by Rembrandt, where everyone had his station’ (M. Barceló interviewed by Olivier Zahm, Purple, no. 24, Fall/Winter 2015, n. p.). Animalari (Renifleurs) seems to traverse an incomprehensible expanse of time, the very origins of humanity brought to the present, and Barceló’s animal heads are an ancestral communion. With its subtly variegated tones and thoughtfully textured surface, there is a dream-like tranquillity to Animalari (Renifleurs), the poetic flow of time and memory. These traces of time are central to Barceló who describes his painting practice like the marks left in the sand after a bullfight: ‘my paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact. The picture object is a bit like the sand of the arena, a sort of detritus of what took place there’ (M. Barceló quoted in Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, exh. cat. Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2002, p. 98). With its intensely physical surface, Animalari (Renifleurs) seems to be held in time and with his sculptural, expressive brushwork, Barceló sets them free.