If Art Were Bread
By Tomás Barceló
Creating art isn’t about making objects or showing off skills—it’s about transforming the familiar into something new. Creativity needs time, warmth, balance. It needs the right ingredients and hands that know how to wait.
Imagine a dough: flour, water, a bit of salt… and yeast. Flour on its own is lifeless. Yeast, by itself, can’t do much. But when they meet, the mystery begins: the yeast feeds on the flour, releases gas, and the dough begins to rise. The flour, in turn, provides the structure, the nourishment, the texture. They need each other. They both change in the process.
That’s how creativity works. The world gives us the flour: the raw material of reality—memories, emotions, questions. The artist is the yeast: active, transformative, capable of creating something that wasn’t there before. But it needs a framework to hold it, a structure that prevents the art from collapsing the moment it touches the world. That framework is the audience.
The audience isn’t just a passive viewer. It’s an essential part of the process. It’s the one who nourishes, interprets, and completes the creator’s gesture. Like the gluten that holds the air bubbles in the dough, the audience gives shape, direction, and meaning to what art is trying to say. When the audience gets involved, art breathes. When they are moved, the work blossoms. When there’s dialogue, everything comes to life. Creativity needs open hearts—not empty ones, and not walls.
And just as warm bread is broken at the table and joyfully shared, true art is meant to be shared, to be passed around, and to nourish something deep within those who see it—and those who make it.
