Galería Elvira González is pleased to announce the exhibition Kiwayu, by Miquel Barceló, opening in the gallery on Thursday, April 7th, 2022. The works in the show were all made by Barceló during the pandemic between the island of Kiwayu, in the archipelago of Lamu in Kenya (2021) and the island of Majorca (2020), where the artist has his atelier and a ceramic workshop. The show is a hymn to life, a moment of joie de vivre that the artist wants to share with the viewer, inviting us to enjoy the sea and its fruits, the heat, the feeling of freedom and the joy of living by the water. The sea has been a permanent source of inspiration for the Majorcan artist.
On the occasion of the exhibition a catalog with texts by Miquel Barceló and the writer Paul Bowles will be published. Bowles, besides being a friend shared like Barceló the experience of living in the exotic and unknown island of Taprobane, in Sri Lanka, 1956. Barceló declares with a certain surprise: the underwater plunge every morning, and the hours of painting and reading, provided me with at least a kind of quiet stupor. I have often noticed that when in life everything seems to go to hell, in the studio things happen. Apparently, the artist himself does not know what is going to happen in his improvised workshop by the sea, where is he going to come out, or rather, where his paintings are going to come from. There is no preconceived plan, nor does he know which watercolors he is going to paint, not even the motifs. It seems that things come to him as the hours of the day go by.
Furthermore, in this writing and on the occasion of the exhibition, Barceló reflects on the importance of paper, not only as a support for his work, but because paper itself, like clay for the ceramics, calls him to form part of his work. In essence he explains: When I started working with them (the sheets of paper) they gave a pretty good result. I liked those leaves. They always have a penetrating perfume; they make me want to smoke them... so these things are important. Barceló uses paper, clay or whatever he has at hand to be modeled or painted, out of sheer necessity, compelled to do so beyond his own volition.
Barceló's fascination with prehistoric cave art with its proliferation of animals and moving figures is also evident in the ceramics in the exhibition. Since the 1990s, when he began to use the ancient clay modeling techniques he was taught in Dogon Country (Mali), Barceló paints his ceramics like the first man in the primeval cave, out of a need to explain what he sees naturally, to communicate.
The 26 watercolors and 11 ceramics in Kiwayu make up an exhibition where Barceló shows once again his most personal and intimate world.
