Senza Blu (Without Blue)

Held in the same private collection since 2005, Miquel Barceló’s Senza Blu (Without Blue) (2004) is a monumental expanse of texture and life. The canvas spans three metres in width and two metres high, and is strewn with fertile organic forms—what look like halved onions, a bone, split fruit, and spiked shapes that might be sea urchins or seedpods—painted in spidery fronds and threads of black. Without blue, as the title describes, the painting’s red primer glows beneath a broadly brushed top-coat of white paint, which is scored and gathered in whorls and rivulets of impasto. The pared-back palette is typical of Barceló’s paintings from this year, which look back to his late-1980s series of Paysages pour aveugles (Landscapes for the blind), whose white surfaces were spread over visible undercoats of bright colour. Its profusion of suggestive, biomorphic shapes—reminiscent at once of the remains of a banquet and a primordial marine world—captures his fascination with nature and the motif of the bodegón or still-life, as well as his experimental, elemental approach to texture and material. In 2004—the same year Senza Blu was painted—Barceló became the youngest living artist to be honoured with an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. The work has been widely exhibited in its lifetime, including in major solo shows in San Sebastián, Lugano and Avignon.

Coming to prominence with seminal works inspired by his travels to Africa in the late 1980s, along with his celebrated ‘bull fight’ paintings initiated several years later, the Mallorca-born Barceló developed a raw, visceral mixed-media language that combined thick reliefs of pigment with material including rice, sand, food scraps, vegetation and cigarette ends. Informed by the matiérisme of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer’s near-sculptural canvases, he has described himself as a ‘baker’: he likens painting to cooking, and is enthralled by the way in which natural and manmade substances transform in the process of art-making. Works such as Senza Blu take on a metaphysical quality, their ephemeral subjects poised between matter and image. The painting also evokes the mythic, poetic dimension of works by the American abstractionist Cy Twombly or the Catalan Joan Miró, who incorporated similarly primal, essential forms into their pictures.

In conjunction with his painterly investigations, Barceló travelled widely over years, finding inspiration in the Saharan dunes of Mali, the rocky mountains of the Himalayas and the play of light upon the ocean surrounding his home in Mallorca. Senza Blu, with its signs of life swimming before our eyes, becomes a sensual hymn to the richness of existence above and beneath the waves. ‘As frequently as he has addressed the idea of the bodegón,’ writes Dore Ashton, ‘Barceló has taken up the motif of the sea … The black holes take us into the depths below the seemingly random built-up surfaces, islands of relief transform themselves into suggestive microcosmic or perhaps protoplasmic life. Barceló asserts that protozoa are his subject, but these single-celled creatures are easily transformed into the fruits of the sea he has so often explored previously. Although he tells us it is a bodegón, the small eruptive breaches of the surface, and the floating randomness of the composition, tell us not only that he brought back a living world from “down there”, but that it has both “form” and “un-form.” There is very little still in his still life’ (D. Ashton, ‘Barceló: The Painter as Principle Gladitoar’, in Miquel Barceló: Las Formas del mundo: Obra reciente, exh. cat. Kutxaespacio del Arte, San Sebastián 2005, p. 115).