Miquel Barceló whips paint across the surfaces of his canvases. They rest on the studio floor where pistachio shells fall upon them and become embedded as layer upon layer of paint accumulates. Scratching and scraping at the layered surface, Barceló brings into view familiar shapes and, eventually, recognizable forms develop—fish, octopus, shell, toreador. For viewers, the distance between the intention of the artist and the full manifestation of the object collapses into a singularity. The paintings seem to hold life the way fossils do, preserving and compacting time.
Barceló’s exhibition occupies three rooms at Acquavella, and in addition to many works on canvas, a selection of ceramic objects is included. The sculptures are shaped like pitchers and bowls; they’re painted and scratched into like the surfaces of his canvases, pockmarked, dimpled, and undulatory—how one might imagine the sea floor or the wall of a cave. Bullfighting is represented in multiple iterations. The two environments—arena and sea—form a classical binary. As viewers drift through the rooms of Barceló’s exhibition, they pivot between the spectacular nature of the arena and a sublime underwater world.
When Barceló takes the bullfight for his subject, he employs a bird’s-eye view. With the scene painted from the sky, the arena becomes metaphysical. You can’t feel like a voyeur in an environment you can’t imagine yourself into. Something else happens instead: representational images shift into the zone of symbolism. Consider the sculpture Plat de Toros (2021) or the painting Nocturna (2023–25). The entire phenomenon is refined to three elements: the bull, the toreador, and the circular arena. From this trinity, so much can be extrapolated.
When the artist takes the subaquatic world for his subject, the situation is different. There are two perspectives, looking down and looking out. With images that suggest the seabed, one orients oneself accordingly. Without a defined background, or rather, with a background defined by the actual limits of vision, orientation becomes more complicated. Paintings that proceed along this compositional path, such as Tropic and Scene (both 2025), use scale shifts to create depth. Eel, lobster, octopus—they are variously large and small (near and far)—but they are also on the same plane of perspective. The sense of volume becomes indeterminate; these watery worlds could be oceanic or as shallow as an aquarium.
In Scene, an inky plume flows from an octopus, clouding the pink and blue water. Paint seeps from the bodies of brightly colored fish, diffusing as it radiates outward. Every element seems to be in motion. This contrasts with paintings that depict the seafloor, such as Pen terra amb cranc i corn [Bread with crab and corn] or Clams, Coques, etc. (both 2025). These paintings have a pulsating stillness reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s stained canvases. All of Barceló’s paintings have highly textured surfaces, but the impression is most forceful when the subject matter feels free of commotion. The artist gives drop shadows to the forms on the seabed, a choice that infuses the images with a touch of a naturalism. The shadows angle sharply, as if the sun were low. They emphasize the placement of Barceló’s shells, crabs, shrimp, and playing cards, which rest like objects on a table and echo the arrangement of forms in the “Constellations” series of his fellow Catalonian, Joan Miró.
Despite the vitality of Barceló’s energetic paint handling and his tendency towards vivid color, the work exudes a pensive sensibility. The specter of death is ever-present, and it is beautiful and seductive like a bouquet of flowers beside a burning candle. Of course, when one gazes upon a dimly lit skull, as in Á la bougie (2023–25), melancholy associations arise, but what does it mean for the artist to pierce his canvas with a hefty fishing hook? Barceló’s piercings are different from Lucio Fontana’s canvas-slicing because they are not stand-alone gestures: they’re incorporated into the underwater scenes. The hooks are baited; the fish are interested. Barceló catches the heavy moment of choice, fat with anticipation, freighted with desire, alluring and potentially fatal.
