Handmade chemistry

Colm Toíbín in conversation with Miquel Barceló.

Colm Tóibín: In The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Hans Castorp sees an X-ray of himself for the first time, and it’s almost erotic, he sees what really his soul or his body, what the X-ray has done. There’s something about your recent paintings that have that element of looking at X-Rays. Could you tell me technically how the paintings are made?

Miquel Barceló: It’s bleached canvas. In the beginning, I used black paper or board and bleach and a little bit of white chalk.

CT: Just to get the outline?

MB: Yes. And always with the model in front of me. I can’t use pictures—I have tried at times but it is not the same. . . something happens with the real model that can never happen with pictures.

CT: So you have the black canvas and then you get the bleach. When you were doing the portrait of me, one of the things I noticed was that you had to work very fast.

MB: I do it fast because I don’t know how to do it slowly.

CT: Because it’s so thin.

MB: Yes, and you don’t see what happens until the day after. You believe it happens but you don’t know. I now use several canvases. . . linen, cotton, and velvet. Cotton is faster and you only see a little bit, because of the humidity in the air. It’s funny, because the day after it is a big surprise—sometimes it is very good and sometimes not so good.

CT: It is not like taking a photograph. These portraits are very severe and I love mine, but my friends think, How could you let this happen to you, because you look like an animal and I said, “Well I am an animal!”