Cuina Mallorquina

"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. Other times I draw closer to the roots and they become more clearly allegorical, like those composed of an open book, an empty glass and a fish, but I use them for my own ends. In doing still lifes, I'm not trying to break tradition, but simply to put myself within it and to be coherent. 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." (M. Barceló, in K. Power, Conversations with Barceló, Alicante 1985).