Miquel Barceló – Jean Marie del Moral
Forty years of silence
Paris, in the mid-1980s. A young man with thick blonde hair, wrapped in a dark coat, walks down the street with a decisive step, towards the man who is waiting for him. “Hello”, he says when he reaches the latter, giving him a firm handshake. This was the first meeting between Mallorcan artist Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, 1957) and French photographer Jean Marie del Moral (Montoire-sur-le-Loire, 1952). A relationship that has lasted for forty years, and which Jean Marie himself tells us about in first person.
photography Jean Marie del Moral
“The first time I went into Miquel Barceló’s studio I had the same sensation as when I entered Joan Miró’s. It was a very large space and the partition walls were half demolished. The whole place was shrouded in an acrid odour of paint. I went through the rooms, where chaotic disorder reigned. The floor of the main room was covered in pieces of paper and empty Gitanes’ cigarette packages. Three large canvases were stretched out on the floor; there were some filing cabinets, a wonky white wooden chair, a stool with several empty beer cans on it and a series of large, unfinished paintings propped up against the wall.
As his work clothes, Barceló had donned a black jacket and a pair of old grey trousers, both of which had paint stains, and a pair of enormous boots. He lit a cigarette, crossed the studio with long strides and leaned over the pots to pour the paint. He turned on the stereo and a Jimmy Hendrix song started to blast out. He [...]
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