Man Reading Newspaper

"I'd been doing (portraits) since the beginning. Portraits of friends, of poor artists. They were all friends of mine, and poor. It interested me a lot as a theme. (...) In portraits everything is more concentrated (...), what I paint changes by millimeters. (...) I believe the portrait is the paradigm of all painting. The representation of the human figure is the basis of everything. (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987-1997, exh. cat., Barcelona, 1998, p. 24).