6½ Citrons

6½ Citrons finds the artist at his most playful. On a lavish yellow ground, splattered concentrations of gritty, green relief are transformed into battered half-lemons by the inclusion of an outline in charcoal. But this move cuts to the heart of the artist's practice. As Patrick Mauriès writes "We realise how challenging his view of things is when we see the images of Barceló contemplating, with palpable tension and intensity, the star-like shape of a cut tomato or half a lemon, the flaking scales of a dead fish or the clotted blood of an animal's head. Contemplation itself holds nothing Apollonian for him; when he chose to reintroduce into his paintings the dimension that the Viennese art historians call the Haptic, in which the gaze is made to move across and sensually experience, in an almost dream-like fashion, the texture and the surface of the canvas itself, he does so with striking violence and deliberation, with what seems to be all the strength he can muster."