«I sleep little and read a lot», Miquel Barceló confesses. Dreams and nomadic readings between their homes in Paris and Mallorca, with their escapes to the most remote places in Asia, northern India or a beach in Thailand that nobody goes to and which does not even say the name. Barceló paints, draws, creates sculptures, molds ceramics ... But there is another Barceló, another Miquel, more intimate: that of books.
"It's like a genre of mine, making books," acknowledges the artist, a wounded letter who read The Metamorphosis at 13 years old and toured the bookstores in Palma de Mallorca to buy all of Kafka's books. But Kafka will come later, now we are with Goethe and his monumental Faust. The flashback is in 1982, when Barceló had just arrived in Paris (then he was 25 years old) and bought two lithographs of Delacroix: «An era of Mephistopheles with Margarita, very sexy. And the other represented Faust and Mephistopheles talking to a flying horse, ”he recalls. At that time, he began painting his series on libraries. Goethe appears in one of the paintings surrounded by books ("I still have this one," he says), in another, Barceló himself with an erection. Almost like a premonition of the 80s, those engravings by Delacroix and Goethe in his library, foreshadow the Fausto diptych that Barceló has just completed for Gutemberg Galaxy.
A few years ago, on one of his trips to the Himalayas, loaded with a suitcase full of papers, watercolors and two editions of Faust (one French and one Catalan), Barceló began painting the images that Goethe did not write . «I don't know how to illustrate. I am a painter, ”he says. Barceló builds his own cosmogony, with his obsessions and recurring images. Octopuses and boats. «Any time is good for octopus to appear ...», Barceló laughs. Or a man who is also half fish (something Goethe never imagined, but Barceló did). «It's like a billiard. I never do a direct translation. The most accidental images, the most unexpected, are then the ones that best serve, ”he explains.
Centaurs, mermaids, nymphs, mythological beings, neoclassical temples, the desire for power, desire, Faust-Mephistopheles duels ... "Mephistopheles always wins , " Barceló says with a wry smile. It doesn't matter that in the end Goethe redeems his Faust with a chorus of angels that elevate him to heaven. The game has been won over and over again by Mephistopheles, the devilish temptation. "Mephistopheles, c'est moi," Barceló jokes. Although in fact he feels more identified with Goethe and recommends, insistently, his magnificent meteorological studies collected in The Game of the Clouds.
The game - seriously, yes - Barceló with Goethe has already ended. In 2018 he published the first part of Faust - which Goethe wrote with 30 years - and now the second part ends - which Goethe completed at 70 years old. "Are very different. The first is a more Shakespearean story, but the second is philosophy, like a Bible, something very postmodern: there are jokes, Greek tragedy, travel, the invention of money, the usury of banks ... Everyone knows Faust I , in which the soul is sold to the devil and talk about redemption, but the second part is something else, it is an explosion, an infinite ... », says Barceló, who has given Fausto the vibrant and intense colors of the Himalayas. « I wanted to get Faust out of the dark, let there be palm trees and sun. It has always been represented in a very gray way, ”says Barceló. His Faust is colorist and expressionist, a Faust that rivals the crimson and laspislazuli Hindu tones.
"The whole book is an object," he considers. The painter has manufactured - he uses that verb, to make - a plastic book, with all its spots and ink marks, with different papers and textures, even napkins. And then he has superimposed it on Goethe's text, "like a book on top of another book." The result is almost a bibliophile book, with 360 pages, 72 watercolors, a circulation of 4,000 copies and a price of 125 euros.
After Goethe, Kafka. «I didn't think Metamorphosis was illustrable. It is so intense ... How can it be improved? It is a book about the transformations: of the parents, of the sister, of Gregor, of the landscape, of Europe, of Prague ... He already plans the premonition of war ... », points out the artist. The metamorphosis will be published in 2020 by Gallimard in France and by Galaxia Gutenberg in Spain, an editorial that has practically specialized in Barceló with a dozen titles. "Oh yeah? I didn't know I had so many books ... », he is surprised. And the editor Joan Tarrida begins to recite them: the three of the Divine comedy, the Notebooks of Africa and those of the Himalayas, the essay by Dore Ashton, The chapel on the cathedral of Palma, their engravings to illustrate the radical erotic story The dogs of Hervé Guibert ... " My work is always very sexual, " Barceló concedes. After Kafka he immersed himself in Sexistance , the theory of sex and existence of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. At the moment, it will only be published in France.
Proust is pending. The last volume of In Search of Lost Time , the one in which Proust becomes a character in his work and manages to write the word END in Recovered Time, which will also be Barceló.
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