Miquel Barceló, Ressac

From one island to another—from Mallorca to Porquerolles—and
a Catalan studio to the Villa Carmignac, Miquel Barceló inscribes
his work within a Mediterranean progression. In dialogue with The
Imaginary Sea, he was given carte blanche to entirely transform the Villa’s vaulted gallery.

The deeply insular artist draws from the sea, the sand, the seascape: sources that inspire him.

Ressac is a painting that one enters, made up of successive layers of plaster and clay that embrace every volume and surface of the space: walls, floors and glass partitions. Like painting projected onto architecture, it evokes the movement of an intense wave doubling
backing on itself.

This devastated landscape is, for Miquel Barceló, akin to the painter’s studio, transformed into a strange cave, dry after the wave recedes and the water evaporates.

Submerged by this tidal wave like a marine life Pompeii, objects, people and animals (octopuses, swordfish, bison)—be they protectors or predators—are trapped in the clay.

This attack of the sea conveys a new shape, revealing traces of an ancient society on the walls like cave art, seemingly connecting this marine-inflected work to its origins.