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Lot Essay
Painted in 1990, Plaza con dos puertas is one of a group of pictures on the subject of the bullfight that Barceló executed that year. Filled with impasto and incorporating objects both organic and inorganic within its very fabric, this is a painting that burst from the canvas and into the world of the viewer. It blurs the boundaries between our world and the represented one. This is an intense, swirling and whirling vision of action, the rings of the stands becoming a whirlpool that drags our eyes to the centre of the canvas, to the battle between man and beast. Plaza con dos puertas is a frenzied tornado of a picture-- the scene's action and actions of the painter himself-- apparent in the gestural brushwork-- convey a sense of activity and excitement and of sheer, bloody life.
Barceló became particularly fascinated with the bullfight after his first journeys to Africa. In the arena, he found something that was ineffably Spanish, ancient, gritty, a sphere in which ritual dances with life and death. Having purged himself, in Africa and the Alps, of what he saw as a superficial layer of accreted culture, he now discovered that, on his own doorstep, in his own homeland, there existed something as profound and as fundamentally involved with existence as the life he had found in the extreme climate and conditions of the desert.
Barceló identifies himself with the torero, and sees his own role as a painter in a similar light. The torero and Barceló share a desperate insistence on the deep link between life and art. This painting, like its subject, is not a scene being acted out, recorded and represented, but is instead a brutal and honest blood-and-guts emanation of Barceló's efforts before the canvas: 'As in bullfighting, I believe, one doesn't paint with ideas. The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas' (Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987 1997, exh. cat., Barcelona 1998, p. 112).
Barceló became particularly fascinated with the bullfight after his first journeys to Africa. In the arena, he found something that was ineffably Spanish, ancient, gritty, a sphere in which ritual dances with life and death. Having purged himself, in Africa and the Alps, of what he saw as a superficial layer of accreted culture, he now discovered that, on his own doorstep, in his own homeland, there existed something as profound and as fundamentally involved with existence as the life he had found in the extreme climate and conditions of the desert.
Barceló identifies himself with the torero, and sees his own role as a painter in a similar light. The torero and Barceló share a desperate insistence on the deep link between life and art. This painting, like its subject, is not a scene being acted out, recorded and represented, but is instead a brutal and honest blood-and-guts emanation of Barceló's efforts before the canvas: 'As in bullfighting, I believe, one doesn't paint with ideas. The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas' (Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987 1997, exh. cat., Barcelona 1998, p. 112).