RACCOLTA DI POLVERE (DUST COLLECTION)
12 March – 30 April 2002
Tues – Sat 11.00-19.00 closed Sundays and holidays

To refresh his sensation of life at its most basic and powerful level, Miquel Barcelo leaves Paris and Majorca far behind to spend his winters in Mali in western Africa. The very coarse fabric of human experience there, with its material poverty, is for him nevertheless rich in impressions and spirituality. Through intense observation of what is around him, and thanks to his great talent, Barcelo fixes the tension between the material and the spiritual into his work. Fétiche fragile aux Allumettes, for example, has match-sticks stuck onto it, and a match-box at the centre of the painting is an amulet. During an outdoor working session in the winter 1999/2000, a storm started and dust was deposited on the surface of the paint, as can be seen in Fétiche sous la Poussière and Chemin de Poussière avec Ancêstres. Such dust or sand storms are apparently common in Mali. In Too far from Home, a book illustrated by Barcelo in 1991, Paul Bowles describes such a storm, eerily presaging these paintings: “When Monday came, the dust had reached such a state of opacity that from the roof it was impossible to distinguish forms in the street below” (pg. 50). Given the difficulty of transportation, it is no surprise that all but one of the paintings in this catalogue are small enough to carry by hand. In Mali, paper is the artist's medium of choice. The five drawings were all done in February 2000 with exceptionally strong colours, probably reflecting the use of local pigments.

A number paintings have skulls, the image of mortality, with cult statues which are symbols of the spirits of ancestors and thus symbolise life after death, as in Statuette et Crâne I. Barcelo is never guilty of taking things too seriously, and his work always has humour. Tabouret avec Crâne et deux Pièces depicts a skull on a stool. Because it is so large, the stool is dwarfed and it looks more like a head rest of the sort they use in Africa instead of pillows, and after all, a head is resting on it. Barcelo also proposes a novel way to dispose of annoying loose change, at least for artists: just include it in your paintings. Porc-Epic shows a porcupine, common especially in eastern Africa. The inclusion of this painting in the group with Animist statues is quite right: the many quills on its back make it look like a Nail Fetish.

Ever since his first trip to Mali in 1988 Barcelo has become involved as a dweller with the different peoples which live there and are collectively referred to as the Dogon. The cult statues in six different paintings are typical. Patine sacrificielle shows an apparently Djennenke-style kneeling hermaphrodite figure in which both the beard and breasts have been accentuated. Barcelo is a collector of such statues and knows that an important component of value is the patina that develops over years of sacrificial libations and offerings. The black of the wood figure seems to have been done with charcoal, perhaps wood that was burnt directly for this purpose on site. The red line in the background is a visual device which is also used in an important painting from 1992, Le Bal des Pendus. In Couple sacrificielle the artist has painted two Djennenke statues and then used red and earth to effect a sacrificial libation of paint directly on the canvas.

As Daniel Amez says in Dogon Statuary: “…We can thus claim with even greater intensity that primitive arts are to the twentieth century what the arts of antiquity were to the Renaissance: an undivided recognition, a spiritual and primal bond.”