‘Autoréférence infinie’ : individual, community and history in Miquel Barceló’s works

Abstract

The present dissertation has the primary goal of situating the artist Miquel Barceló within the contemporary critical debate, discussing his production during the Postmodern Era and demonstrating the affinity of his researches with Hypermodernity. The critical reconsideration of the artist is based upon the theoretical structure developed in the first two chapters, which provides a fundamental background for the analysis of Barcelό’s production. The study conducted in this thesis is particularly important in order to discuss the critical appreciation of the artist, who has, till now, been linked with the major movements of the Postmodern Era and whose fortune has lately been related to the Spanish socio-political conjuncture during the same epoch. The discussion of Barcelό’s primitivism, which opens to Vico’s idea of poetic wisdom and to Freud’s oceanism, provides not only a reconsideration of the artist’s production, but it also suggests a new way of approaching the question of the primitive, which is usually limited to the stylistic and formal analysis of the works. Similarly, the discussion of Barcelό’s production during the Eighties opens the discussion to the different major movements of the Postmodern Era and to their international relationship. The methods of research adopted in the gathering of the data vary from onsite analysis, archival study and oral interviews. The study of the unpublished material was mostly conducted at Barcelό’s private archive, which contains all the artist’s journals, but also his complete bibliography and printed versions of all the unpublished dissertations dedicated to the artist. The oral interviews were conducted through repeated discussions with the artist (included in the Appendices). The onsite analysis of Barcelό’s work was done on numerous journeys in several museums and institutions (such as the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Els Baluard Museum in Majorca, Fundaciό March in Majorca); temporary exhibitions (L’altro ritratto at the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto); and churches (The Cathedral of Palma de Majorca). Moreover, the direct analysis of Barcelό’s works took place regularly during the four months that the author spent in Majorca, having daily access to his atelier. Throughout the comparison of Barcelό’s writings, declarations, and works, the study examines the artist’s autofiction, creating a connection between the artist’s hyperindividualism (which is discussed in relation to the Hypermodern Era) and an oceanic feeling.