Miquel Barceló set up a studio in Mali about ten years ago after he started making ceramics there in 1995. Since then he has created several hundred pieces. The story goes that a sand storm prevented him from painting and so he had no choice.
Miquel Barceló's contribution to ceramic art is not just simple painted decoration.
From these magmas of pummelled, misshapen, manhandled earth emerge shapes and decorations which are in keeping with the original themes of Barcélo's picture work.
The archetypal shapes that are spun out of the savoir-faire of the potter undergo treatment that almost destroys them, threatening them with a return to chaos and forging a presence, the fruit of the earth. The painter describes these ceramics as being sort of “outcrops of his painting”
Barceló's approach follows that of the modern painters who, since Gauguin, and closer to him, Miró and Picasso, have been drawn to ceramics and have added a third dimension to their creations through the association of those ancestral mythologies of the Arts of Fire.
Aditionnally, two rooms of the Collection Lambert are showing the works of Miquel Barceló in an exhibition called Le paradoxe du comédien, les figures de l'acteur (The Actor's Paradox, Figures of the Player), terracotta masques and big-scale paintings are presented with works on paper by Pablo Picasso on the theme of theatre.
Production
réalisation : Festival d'Avignon
avec le soutien: de la Délégation aux Arts plastiques du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
