The overtly expressionistic quality of Barceló’s figurative works from the late 1970s betrays the influence of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956),

 Art Brut 

Jean Dubuffet acuñó este término para referirse a la práctica artística pura, alejada de los condicionantes derivados de lo aprendido o de la sociedad.

, Joan Miró (1893-1983) and Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012). His work evolved from there towards other concerns centred on his reflections on the tradition of painting, the power of nature in his African landscapes and by more intellectual and abstract postulates.

Barceló quickly rose to fame both in Spain and worldwide. In 1986 he received Spain’s National Visual Arts Award, and in 2003 the Prince of Asturias Award.

After his first trip to Western Africa in 1988, his work took on a new meaning. It was then when he created his white paintings, the series to which this work in the BBVA Collection belongs. In it, the artist was breaking new ground for his painting, and he found it in the desert of Mali, where he set up a studio and spent long sojourns. His experiences in that country are compiled in Cuadernos de África, a delightful diary written by the artist over a period of twelve years.

This Paysage pour aveugles sur fond vert bears many similarities with its correlates ...sur fond rouge and ...sur fond jaune, all of them made in 1989.

In Barceló, the subject matter of a quasi-transcendental desert space flooded with light is further magnified by the use of white, a colour already explored by Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), or American artists like Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Robert Ryman (1930). The nearly total absence of colour in the work emphasises its texture, its matter, whose accumulations physically reproduce a stony landscape, a “landscape for the blind” almost inducing us to read it like braille. Barceló achieves this matteric quality by mixing oil with sands and grains of rice which he then lavishly lays on the canvas.

For the Dogon people, a stone represents the whole of the universe. That is perhaps the reason for Barceló’s insistence on this stony landscape that became such a source of inspiration for him. Here he delimits the space with green boundaries which could speak to the fact that regeneration and the inherently hopeful cycle of the earth exists even in the desert.