Author: Tomás Barceló
In recent years, artists have spoken a great deal about technique, language, and expressive resources. But before all that there is a simpler and more difficult question: what do we want to say?
What a work wants to express can rarely be explained with words. If it could be done with a text or a speech, the work itself would probably not be necessary. That is why I never explain my sculptures. What I have to say is already there, inside the piece. Yet we can speak about where that content is born.
As some of you know, a few months ago my father died. The last years of his life were marked by Parkinson’s disease, and I was fortunate to accompany him for a long time. I have always considered myself a fairly strong and rational person, someone who usually keeps what he feels and what he thinks in good order. I am grieving, as is natural, and I am carrying it well—although it is curious how emotions appear.
Recently I went to the butcher shop to buy chicken breast to bread, and in that absolutely trivial gesture—asking for chicken at the counter—all the buttresses I had built against my sorrow suddenly collapsed. It was not the chicken, of course; it was everything else. And emotions always find unexpected cracks. Breaded chicken was a dish my father used to prepare when my nephews came over to eat.
I think artists must be especially attentive to those cracks. Not to grand abstractions or to general theories about life—which belong to other disciplines—but to the small details that move us and fascinate us.
There is a wonderful scene in The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s autobiographical film. While the whole family is preoccupied with the grandmother’s death, the young Spielberg notices the pulse beating in the artery of her neck. For him, life is concentrated in that small beat. It is not that he is less sensitive to pain than the others. It is that his artist’s gaze settles on that detail.
The best-known piece of my career, the blue ceramic Calix, was born almost as a formal game. But while working on it I remembered that my French grandmother had a blue ceramic tableware set with Napoleonic scenes. When I finished dessert as a child, I would always look at the bottom of the plate to discover which scene had appeared. When I made the first blue Calix, I thought it was too personal—almost a private joke no one would understand. Yet it became one of the pieces that connected most strongly with people. Individuals from all over the world wrote to me saying that the blue ceramic reminded them of their grandmother, their childhood, or their home.
What is deeply personal is sometimes also deeply universal. Perhaps because those emotional cracks are not only ours. They are symbolic places where many human experiences resemble one another.
Technique and language are important. They are the tools with which we build the work. But we cannot forget that we must return to looking at the world with innocent eyes and remain attentive to those small things that fascinate and move us.
That is where art begins.
1 comment
Qué simple es sentir y las personas nos permitimos poco ese espacio.