Rooted to the ground, intuitive and, as someone once rightly said, immune to pop, Miquel Barceló has created an abrupt and sacred art, expressive, mysterious and energetic. His interventions in the chapel la capilla del santísimo of the cathedral of Mallorca and the un headquarters include that duality and represent an extension of painting, modeling at the same time earlier architectural structures.
In the case of the majorcan temple, the work carried out between 2001 and 2006 is the plastic metamorphosis of the sacred space from a material so lively and flexible as clay and an iconographic repertoire around the figure of the risen christ, accompanied by the passage of the multiplication of fish and the wedding at cana.
The urrounding ceramic mural pretty much covers the entire chapel, a composition full of worldly, real elements such as the sea, the fish, plants, light, a perfect marine atmosphere for prayer and meditation. As for to the dome of the room xx of human rights, completed in 2008, it is carried out with cannon fire andjets of paint using the best pigments of intense tones as lapis lazuli, oranges, greens and yellows. The colour layer bathes the surface with solid and sharp icicles which, although reminding of the inside of a cave, also allude to the need for a permanent movement toward the future. A poetic threat towards opportunism or comfort of its inhabitants, a threat in its most primitive sense, and primitivism and naturalism are two constants in miquel barceló’s aesthetics, a successor of the modern pictorial tradition, a plastic renovation from the roots, manifestation of experience, painter of all that lives.
