Miquel Barceló: "We live as in a dress rehearsal for death"

Miquel Barceló maintains the desire to immerse himself in the primitive, in the original, in the foundational.

It is an insistence that postpones the idea of ​​nothingness and fuels the world's appetite for doing.

As on a return trip, he has returned to Kafka, to

, to the coven of a man alone in the proper room of a narrow house.

To the agonizing confinement of Gregor Samsa.

The Gallimard publishing house proposed to him to illustrate this deranged story and in Spain the Galaxia Gut publishing house picked up the witness

emberg.

The result is a powerful edition where the euphoria of color hits everything.

Seen at this moment, Kafka's piece acquires more force.

It was not planned, but it is tremendous how timely it is.

Especially,

, which in this translation of Galaxia Gutemberg is called

.

Has your interpretation of the book changed since you started working on the watercolors until now?

It is unavoidable.

I started developing the first pieces of the book two years ago, when there was no pandemic.

And I also did it in a new studio that I have in southern Thailand, in a place very far from the usual routes of tourism.

He painted in an idyllic territory, under the coconut trees ...

The landscape opposed to the spirit that moves 'The metamorphosis'.

That's.

In a radically different space.

Far from the closed, gray, urban and winter spirit where Kafka wrote it.

It seemed good to me to take that world of his to the beach, to nature, to the blue.

It is interesting to approach in full sun to the dark power of the nightmare that is in this literature.

I took it, in a way, as an experiment.

And now, in view of what is happening, he has another pulse, another force, another contamination.

Contamination?

Yes. I wanted the book to be contaminated with paint, with my painting.

This can be seen well when you see that the stains of the artist's notebook have remained on the text pages.

It's something I wanted to keep.

It is appreciated in both editions, but in the French one, published by Gallimard, it is even more visible how the painting is embedded in the words or vice versa.

The paradox is that I have had to write a note for the French edition because there have been some readers who have returned the copy convinced that it was defective or stained due to printing problems.

It is a rejection of the anomaly.

What thing, right?

Especially considering that what Kafka proposes is to immerse yourself mentally in the anomalous, in the strange, in the uncomfortable.

Well, I was glad that that happened with this book.

Have you worked on it in a different way from other books of yours?

Yes. This time I asked the publisher to give me a blank, blank copy, with the same paper that it was going to be used and with similar dimensions.

I wanted this work to be a whole from the beginning.

I have not created plates that were later inserted, but painted from the book itself.

What is your reader relationship with Kafka?

From my memories of first readings I remember the awe of the stories of Edgar Alla Poe and later

by Kafka.

I would be 14 or 15 years old.

I think it was something early.

I considered it as a great joke, as a great cruel text.

And I still think it's a great macabre joke.

Something that extends to almost all of his work.

Yes, Kafka is like an electroshock.

And when they asked him to do 'The metamorphosis' ...

Well, I thought it was Ovidio's ... But when the time came, I realized that at Gallimard they were proposing to me it was Kafka's.

Almost better.

Return to 'The metamorphosis', how it was.

It has a lot of the emotions of my reading as a teenager, but something has changed.

The feeling of monstrosity is now more extreme.

Today I understand better that it is not Gregor Samsa who is transformed, but his entire environment.

The father is transmuted into authority, his sister into a sexualized woman, the maid into a violent being ... When Kafka wrote this story, World War I, anti-Semitism and the 1918 pandemic were brewing. It is significant.

Besides the fact that the book is pure literature, there are no concessions to metaphor.

What it does is take us to a territory where what is most disturbing is not knowing what we are, or what happens.

Kafka illuminates a lot.

If you look at it, Samsa doesn't die but dries up, runs out, becomes almost nothing.

Instead, everything around it becomes something else.

It is exactly what is happening to us.

We have assumed our monstrosity, what unnerves us is the transformation of others.

What we are not able to control or understand.

And how do you live all this?

As in a personal high Middle Ages: I read, I paint, I listen to music, I go hunting, I dive, I go out in the mountains to look for mushrooms ... But that does not prevent me from looking around uneasily, sometimes even with the naivety of thinking that this we will draw some favorable conclusion, although every time I doubt it more.

If at least there was a minimal geostrategic reorganization of the world that favored the invisible ...

You believe?

The Spanish flu changed life.

We still do not suspect what will happen to us, beyond the terrible digitization and the tyranny of the screens.

That is why it is necessary to claim the relationship with the work of art and not with its digital replica.

That is like resigning ourselves to nothingness.

Hopefully that verse by Lezama Lima is fulfilled: "I don't wait for anyone, but I insist that someone has to arrive."

In this case, something.

Otherwise this will just be a long dress rehearsal for death.

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