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A Feast for the Eyes
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Mallorcan artist Miguel Barceló´s glorious chapel in Palma’s cathedral

Barceló has fashioned a vast ceramic tableau of skulls, fruit and sea creatures

Barceló´s representation of the world of the sea is teeming with fish

An octopus and two fish emerge from the watery depths

Fish and sea creatures have long populated the imagination and work of Barceló

For four long months Barceló clambered over the scaffolding in his workshop south of Naples

Barceló pummelled and beat the clay into shape, and used kitchen utensils and improvised tools

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Mallorcan artist Miguel Barceló has been pleasing the multitudes since the unveiling of his glorious chapel in Palma’s cathedral. Inspired by the miracle of the loaves and fishes, he’s fashioned a vast ceramic tableau of cracked mud, skulls, bursting fruit and wriggling sea creatures.

With gaping eyes, the fish peer out from the distorted, watery depths. They cruise, wriggle and writhe, flap, dart, and dive among the rocks and along the seabed; others come swirling down in great, teeming shoals from the distant, unquiet surface. At the bottom, tossed into the maelstrom, surrounded by squirming eels and submerged deep in the pulsating composition, is the viewer.

“Creating a piece of work that envelops the spectator is the ambition of every artist,” says Mallorcan Miquel Barceló, who has fashioned an extraordinary ceramic tableau, spreading out like a skin over the walls of a chapel within Palma’s Gothic cathedral. “On this occasion I’ve been been able to realize that ambition. If you stand at the foot of the wall where I portray submarine life, you’re standing where I’ve spent hundreds of hours under water.”

For four long months in 2003, Barceló scarcely came up for air. As a chilly spring gave way to a sweltering summer, the artist was submerged in his studio south of Naples, clambering over scaffolding, pummelling, beating, moulding, transforming the clay into a remarkable triptych representing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. On the left is the life-filled sea, on the right the land blessed with an abundance of crusty loaves and over-ripe, splitting and bursting fruit, and in the centre a spectral figure of the wounded, risen Christ.

“It’s been literally beaten into shape,” says the 50-year-old artist, who lives between Paris and Mali. “My hands are all over it. And so are those of my daughter Marcella. When it’s fired, the clay shrinks by 12 per cent and my hands look like a child’s. The really tiny ones are my son’s. If we ever got round to counting the bumps and dents, we’d find there are millions all over the 300m2 of clay in the chapel. It was very physical work and there were days I even used boxing gloves.”

The process began when Barceló was offered an honorary degree from the University of the Balearic Islands. The artist had enjoyed a meteoric rise. Initially influenced by Pollock, by 25 he had made it at both the Sao Paulo Bienal and the prestigious German art fair Documenta. Then came exposure in the Venice Biennale and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, both in 1984. By 2000, when he was approached about accepting the degree he was one of Spain’s most celebrated living artists.

His response was that he’d gladly accept but would also like to do something in his native Mallorca. A retrospective show in the cathedral was then proposed. The bishop, Teodoro Úbeda, soon commissioned the artist to make some new gargoyles, before deciding to offer him the job of transforming the entire chapel of Saint Peter. “Initially I thought I’d do it on a human scale, that the ceramic ‘skin’ would be no more than two metres high. But then, the piece, out of necessity, began to grow,” recalls Barceló. “I soon imagined the panels of a triptych. The wall on the left, with the fish, was the most immediate.”

Fish and the wonders of the deep have populated the artist’s imagination and work since the beginning of his career, during which he has repeatedly and effortlessly captured the fluidity, energy and mystery of the sea. In the case of the chapel, the underwater feel is enhanced by the murky light filtering down through the artist’s grey stained-glass windows which look like the x-rays of giant sea monsters. The grisaille windows were made in collaboration with the French master glass artist Jean Dominique Fleury.

“The patterns are drawn using my fingers because that’s the perfect width for the eye at the distance the windows are viewed from. And they provide, as Cezanne said, that clean light which is perfect for viewing nature.”

“Like Gaudí,” he goes on, “I knew I had to filter the light because the chapel is east-facing and gets too much natural light.”

It’s hardly surprising he should mention Antoni Gaudí. The Catalan modernist and his colleague Josep María Jujol, were the last artists to make a major intervention in the cathedral when they worked together to remodel the main altar in the early 20th century. They were more successful than another famous Spanish artist, Joan Miró, whose plans to work on the cathedral never came to fruition, scuppered, it’s said, by conservative canons. It’s a fate which very nearly befell Barceló's work too, in his case because of financial constraints. By May 2002 the artist was about to renounce the commission due to lack of funds and it was only after a foundation was established, comprising representatives of church, civil, cultural, corporate and financial bodies, that the real work got underway. The theme, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, was suggested by the bishop and Canon Pere Llabrés. Barceló was soon getting his hands dirty in the vast workshop of ceramist Vicenzo Santoriello inside a former convent just outside Salerno. The artist had first started working in clay in Mali, where he lives part of the year and it is, he says, an ideal medium. “Adam was created from clay. Man’s first traces on earth were left in clay. Our first writing was on tablets of clay.”

Working in mixed media was not a new departure for the artist: while he’s best known as a painter, he has often dragged his brush over vast canvases previously scattered with twigs, sand and seaweed and other debris; and he had been experimenting with ceramics since the mid 1990s, though never on this scale. The change was refreshing as well as a challenge. “With painting you’re working with just one surface. With clay, there’s an ambivalence that I like a lot. It’s like adding sodomy to the relationship. You could say it in a more delicate way, but that’s exactly how it is.”

Climbing all over his vast clay canvas, Barceló improvised and invented new techniques. “When I started out I made a giant octopus using bakery utensils I’d never used before. I made the tools I needed: I used kitchen utensils, I used one that minces meat. I didn’t even know what some of them were originally for. I also used the dripping technique with clay, throwing enormous mud “pizzas” of up to 60 kilos–that was the heaviest I could throw–which fell like wet paper creating the forms of sea grottos, jellyfish and octopuses. I made lots of loaves of bread though they were more like blobs than bread until one day I realized I had to dry the mud. With the help of a hair dryer the blobs were transformed into bread. The power of clay to transmute into meat, bread and fish is astonishing.”

And apt, considering the subject matter: Christ transforming a few loaves and fishes into enough to feed the multitude and still have his disciples fill baskets with the leftovers.

“The iconography emerged quite naturally,” says the agnostic Barceló. “I liked the way the central thread of loaves and fishes worked. The loaves came to mean all the fruit of the earth, and the fish all the fruit of the sea. And as the conclusion we have Christ bearing the marks of the crucifixion against a wall of skulls. The job description said I had to do a risen Christ. I initially thought in terms of metaphor. In the first model I designed an amorphous Christ, but I gradually came to see the whole thing as a game of metamorphosis. Here, the human figure is the product of the evolution of the fish and fruit. You could almost make a Darwinian reading of it. Christ is a cross between tuna and pomegranate.”

Christ is something else, too. Short and stocky, the Saviour bears a resemblance to, well, Barceló himself. “There is something of a self-portrait in there too, of the artist in his workshop,” he admits.

“There were days when I would get vertigo, both figuratively and literally, because there were times when I’d have to work 15 metres up in the air. But I also get that feeling every time I walk into the workshop, along with the fear of failing. When I’m working, fear of failure accompanies me all day long. But in my creative process accidents are part of the work. There’ll always be surprises in ceramics, which you just have to accept and take on board.”

The artist used a video camera and monitor while working, allowing him to see the forms emerging on the other side of the clay sheet as he pressed his hands–and feet–into it. The work was relentless, with few breaks as the clay could not be allowed to dry out. And as the weather grew hotter it became impossible to work by day. “I used to start at 2am,” he recalls.

At the end of 2003 the entire piece was fired at 1050ºC and was then shipped by land and by sea to Palma. By then the bishop who had commissioned the work had died, his last wish to be buried in the new chapel. At the beginning of February 2007, when the chapel was finally unveiled, there were the inevitable comparisons to other ambitious works in churches on a grand scale.

“While I was working away I did read a few biographies on Michelangelo. To encourage me. When he was 80 he used to complain that he still hadn’t received a commission worthy of him.

“And I went to the Sistine Chapel one day when they were cleaning it and I went up on the scaffolding so I could see the frescos close up. I did the same with the Goyas in San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid. I love seeing the pigments up close.”

And he loves chatting to the restorers he meets up there on the scaffolding. “I always get on well with them,” jokes Barceló. “Because they imagine that in the future I’ll be providing them with lots of work.”

Main photos: Agustí Torres