The Shape of a Pocket

depicts the African desert, he makes you aware that once, aeons or a few seconds ago, the white surface was flattened and pulverised by water.
    In his art, as on the earth, a flood is both an abundance and a calamity, a deliverance and a death, a beginning and an end.
    In 1994 Miquel Barceló wrote the following in one of his notebooks:
    To paint a flayed ox has rebecome important. Like in other times but always different. Not like the Romans painted food, not like Rembrandt, not like Soutine or Bacon, not like Beuys – suddenly the chance to paint this has become something urgent, necessary, essential: blood and sacrifice … but it would work also with an apple, with a face … one has to take things, one after another, from the stickiness of Berlusconi, and make them anew, fresh and clean, show them palpitating, or with their own sweet rottenness.

    The reference to Berlusconi is telling. Every day, all over the world, the media network replaces reality with lies. Not, in the first place, political or ideological lies (they come later), but visual, substantial lies about what human and natural life is actually made of. All the lies converge into one colossal falsehood: the supposition that life itself is a commodity and that those who can afford to buy it are, by definition, those who deserve it! Most of us know this is false, but very little of what we are shown confirms our resistance. Then we may come upon a painting by Barceló.
    Imagine, suddenly, the substantial material world (tomatoes, rain, birds, stones, melons, fish, eels, termites, mothers, dogs, mildew, salt water) in revolt against the endless stream of images which tell lies about them and in which they are imprisoned! Imagine them, as a reaction, claiming their freedom from all grammatical, digital and pictorial manipulation, imagine an uprising of the represented!
    This is what is happening on these canvases. They are listening to the revolt of the solid and the mortal. Before the deluge of insubstantial consumerist clichés and the claim that the genius of mankind is to be found in the pursuit of profit, they open a floodgate to the elemental flow of life and death.
    Ecological propaganda, however, is no better than any other propaganda when it comes to producing art. And so the secret of these paintings is not in their argument but in the way they listen. They listen to the protest of each thing painted against being so depicted, which means also against being recuperated and used as a lie. They listen and the protests become visual for they are nervously translated into pictorial language.
    Let me list some of the ploys the protests use and the art of painting interprets. There is the ploy against being framed: the things being painted desert the centre and go to the edges.
    There is the refusal to be reduced to a patch of colour: the thing being painted heaves itself up into a three-dimensional lump, or scoops out its hollow inside so that if the canvas was on the floor you could stand a spoon up in it.
    There is the rejection by the thing being painted of cheap labels: a blue fish cuts itself up into nine pieces and deploys itself across the whole terrain of the picture.
    There is the sabotage of the things being painted against anything which is suave and pretends to be complete: painted bodies of flesh stuff themselves with fibres and hair.
    And then there are the continual plots by what is being painted against any uniform space or perspective: things become a mirage, a sky is being stirred like soup, or surfaces of the earth under rain seem as flimsy as a smear across a window.
    Nothing he paints wants to give up its soul and become simply an image. And he goes along with this. ‘I need to have what I am painting beside me,
on
the painting, smelling it, handling it. And then eating it. Using melon rinds as spatulas when I am painting melons, and so mixing their juice with the paint.’
    This could all lead to incoherence, the risk is considerable, and he enjoys the risk. Yet the work remains coherent. I cannot explain why, any more than I can explain why a swarm of bees always has a kind of symmetry.
    I think about Chaim Soutine, not to make an art-historical comparison, but because, by imagining the two painters side by side, I see more clearly what has changed in the world during the last fifty years. Soutine, too, listened intently to the will of what he was painting, and, as a result, his art is full of pathos and suffering. In