From Taüll to 'Guernica': the map of meat and viscera of Miquel Barceló

BarcelonaMiquel Barceló is a painter voracious with tradition. Over the years, he has updated the legacy of the great masters with material paintings that often evoke decomposing flesh. In Mapa de carn, one of the featured works in the new CaixaForum exhibition, Una força del passat; Barceló evoked Pablo Picasso's Guernica,with a scene full of "animals, bodies, eyes, and deformed creatures," as stated by the exhibition's curators, Nimfa Bisbe, director of the La Caixa contemporary art collection; and art historian Carlos Martín. The goal of the exhibition is to reveal "how art history continues to be a very fertile ground for contemporary artists," as Bisbe says. In Mapa de carn, Barceló also used repeated eyes that refer to the iconic Romanesque paintings of Sant Climent de Taüll. "Barceló does not represent only war or the spiritual, but a world seen as dismemberment, viscera, and matter. The work can be read as a brutal update of ancient images of suffering," say the curators.

Una força del passat includes 37 works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and an installation, 32 of which are from the La Caixa contemporary art collection, by established artists such as Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Sherrie Levine, Tacita Dean, Robert Mangold, Jorge Pardo, Julião Sarmento, and Javier Arce. The other five are institutional and private loans from the Reina Sofia Museum, the Solo collection, and the Cadaqués gallery. And thirteen of the works are being exhibited for the first time in Barcelona. "Our collection is an inexhaustible source of stories and perspectives from which to look at the contemporary sphere and from which to also look at our culture. It is a collection that allows us to address many issues and, above all, that generates new readings and new ways of approaching contemporary art," says Bisbe.

The title of A Force of the Past comes from a verse in Poesies mundanes, by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "I am a force of the past. Only in tradition is my love," which can be heard in the voice of Orson Welles in his appearance in the short film La ricotta, directed by Pasolini in 1963. "Pasolini knew very well how to interpret the past, and to think about how there are revolutionary discourses in the past –says Martín–. The past is not just tradition. We are used to thinking of the past as something that weighs, that is already written, that is a kind of marble block that cannot be touched, and this exhibition proposes the opposite, that the past is a kind of energy that arrives and that helps us to understand the present".

In addition to Mapa de carn, among other outstanding works is the large installation by Mike Kelley The Trajectory of Light in Plato's Cave. It is a large wooden container evocative of a cave, which can only be entered on all fours. "The exhibition can be read as a catalog of strategies, of the different ways in which artists use and transform works and images from the past to build new meanings," says Bisbe, citing one of the authors of the catalog, the critic and curator Hans den Hartog Jager. "The history of art is fluid, malleable, and open to new interpretations," adds the curator. And it can also be crumpled, as can be seen in the version that Javier Arce made of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, by Rembrandt. He made the copy only with a marker and keeps it crumpled inside a black trash bag, also present in the exhibition.

A 3D-printed evocation of Degas

Another impactful work is First easy piece,by the Portuguese Julião Sarmento, the female figure of which is a 3D printed evocation of the sculpture by Edgar Degas Fourteen-year-old dancer. While Degas' sculpture caused a stir due to its realism, the use of 3D printing seems like a display of detachment with which Sarmento questions what it means to make sculpture today and where the presence of the body remains.

Of Marcel Duchamp, often considered the most important artist of the 20th century, this exhibition shows the diversity of references that later artists have made to him. Among them, the sinks by Robert Gober, inspired by the famous Urinary, refer to the HIV pandemic. And the "superpainting", as Bisbe says, Live and let die or the tragic end of Marcel Duchamp, by Eduardo Arroyo, Antonio Recalcati, and Gilles Aillaud, puts the generational conflict on the table, and alludes to the attitude of the French artist during the last years of his life, when he opted for silence.

In the final section of the route, Speculum, by the Dutch collective Smack, formed by Tom Meijdam, Thom Snels and Béla Zsigmond, puts the finger on the sore spot of social media excesses with an animated version of Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. "The work translates the Flemish artist's peculiar vision to the digital frenzy of the 21st century –say the curators–. Invasive technology, fragmented identities on social networks, and compulsive behaviors define a landscape where pleasure turns into addiction and beauty into dystopia. Paradise, the core of the triptych, perverts Eden with phallic riders in loop narcissists, dancers of Gangnam style that beg likes and landscapes drowned among corporate products. Eden uncovers a Silicon Valley in pastel tones, like an empty amusement park, an algorithmic promise of utopia that hides alienation and control. Finally, Hell projects the collective fears of the 21st century into a landscape of perpetual torture".