Madrid - As Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo prepares for the
unveiling of his most gigantic work so far at the United Nations
headquarters in Geneva, he is at the height of his artistic glory.
Only a political squabble over the cost of the art work is casting
a shadow over the ceremony, which will be attended by
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Spain's King Juan Carlos and Prime
Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Tuesday, November 18.
Barcelo, who is being compared with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and
Joan Miro (1893-1983), worked for 13 months on redecorating a
negotiating room which will now be known as the Chamber for Human
Rights and the Alliance of Civilizations.
The Alliance of Civilizations project was launched by Zapatero and
his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to improve dialogue
between the West and the Muslim world in 2006.
The ceiling created by Barcelo, which has been compared with
Michelangelo's work at the Sistine Chapel, turns the room into a cave
dripping with thousands of multicoloured stalactites and swept over
by a stormy sea.
'The cave is a metaphor for the agora, the first meeting place of
humans, the big African tree under which to sit to talk, and the only
possible future: dialogue, human rights,' Barcelo explains.
'The sea is the past, the origin of the species, and the promise
of a new future: emigration, travel,' he adds.
The 51-year-old artist describes his new work as 'reaching towards
the infinite, bringing a multiplicity of points of view,' like El
Libro de Arena (The Book of Sand, 1975) by the late Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges, whose grave Barcelo kept visiting during his stay
in Geneva.
Few question the artistic value of the ceiling created by Barcelo,
but its cost has sparked controversy.
The budget to renovate the room amounted to nearly 20 million
euros (25 million dollars), 60 per cent of which was covered by
Spanish sponsors.
The rest was given by the government, including 500,000 euros that
were lifted from a development aid fund.
'Art has no price,' Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said,
eliciting criticism from the conservative opposition which said the
same money could have been used for vaccinating children or opening
water holes in developing countries.
The money did not come from funds which would have been used for
such projects, the government explained.
Talk about the money having been 'stolen from the poor' did not
correspond to reality, said Barcelo, whose used 35 tons of paint on
the work measuring 1,400 square metres.
His team included 20 specialists ranging from a speleologist and a
cook to architects and engineers. Special machinery was designed to
create the artificial stalactites some of which weigh more than 50
kilogrammes.
Barcelo, who masters nearly all artistic techniques ranging from
painting and sculpture to performance art, soared to fame early on,
and is now regarded as one of the world's top contemporary artists.
Dividing his time between his native Majorca, Paris and Mali in
West Africa, Barcelo has absorbed a wide range of influences ranging
from European Baroque to African materials and themes.
'To think that art has made a lot of progress between (the cave
paintings of) Altamira and (Paul) Cezanne is a vain and Western
attempt,' says the artist, who has described painting as 'mud that I
stir with a stick.'
Fascinated by processes of transformation on land and in the sea,
Barcelo sees his art as an 'organized chaos' and as an 'act of
resistance.'
Barcelo's biggest projects include modern terracotta murals for a
Gothic chapel in the cathedral of Palma de Majorca, which were
finished in 2007, but the award-winning artist has vowed not to
become an 'official dinosaur.'
'I don't want to spend my life doing mega-projects or big
pharaonic works,' he says.
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