‘[Cavemen] were in total empathy with the animals. They depicted the animals as if they knew them. They spoke the language. We don’t understand that anymore; we don’t know it’ - Miquel Barceló


With its intricate fossilised surface stretching four metres in width, Cap de Boc Marinat (2005) is a monumental work that exemplifies Miquel Barceló’s tactile, organic painterly language. In the artist’s native Catalan, the title translates to ‘marinated head of a goat’, referring to the goat skull in the upper right-hand quarter of the composition. Across the rest of the canvas, Barceló conjures a primordial soup of plant and animal remains: traces of a biological ecosystem, preserved – or, indeed, ‘marinated’ – in paint. Confronting the viewer like a geological cross-section, or a piece of prehistoric cave art, the work captures the artist’s fascination with nature and decomposition, as well as his experimental approach to painterly textures and materials. Coming to prominence with the seminal works inspired by his travels to Africa in the late 1980s, along with the celebrated ‘bull fight’ paintings initiated several years later, Barceló developed a raw, visceral mixed media language that combined thick, near-sculptural swathes of pigment with fragments of living matter. Describing himself as a ‘baker’, the artist frequently likened painting to cooking, and was enthralled by the way in which natural and manmade substances metamorphosed in the process of art-making. Works such as the present take on the quality of still-lifes, their ephemeral subjects poised between states. Indeed, the goat head – a recurring motif for Barceló – invites comparison with the artist’s Spanish forebear Pablo Picasso, who depicted the animal’s skull in a number of his own nature morte compositions.
Barceló found early inspiration in the work of Jean Dubuffet during a visit to Paris in 1974 – his first trip outside General Franco’s Spain – as well as the transcendental canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, and the paintings of Rembrandt and Velàzquez. Elsewhere, he was deeply influenced by the mystical concerns of fellow Catalan artists Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies, and by the vast mixed media canvases of Anselm Kiefer, which similarly infused their base materials with a sense of mythic and symbolic potency. During the late 1970s, Barceló participated in the conceptual collective ‘Taller Llunàtic’, who frequently addressed environmental issues, and began to create experimental works that explored the decay of live matter. Over the years he would incorporate a variety of unusual substances into his works, including insects, sand, marine algae, shells and food. In conjunction with these investigations, Barceló travelled widely, finding inspiration in the dunes of the Sahara Desert, the rocky mountainscapes of the Himalayas and the play of light upon the ocean surrounding his home in Mallorca. Indeed, the present work’s sparkling blue and white palette may be said to evoke his sublime seascapes of the same period – a notion that would seem to lend new meaning to the word ‘marinated’. With its fleeting signs of life swimming before our eyes, it represents a grand hymn to the majesty and mystery of existence.