Mud and skulls chapel delights Catholic Spanish bishop
Pastor Dale Morgan
Mud and skulls chapel delights Catholic Spanish bishop*
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian
Gothic architecture and contemporary art have become unlikely bedfellows
in a Catholic Spanish cathedral after the artist Miquel Barceló was
commissioned to cover one of its chapels with a vast ceramic tableau of
cracked mud, dead fish and human crania. The result, as the art critic
Josep Casamartina put it yesterday, "is a mysterious cave, full of
skulls and monsters".
Barceló, one of Spain's best-known contemporary artists and a
self-proclaimed agnostic, spent six years on the project, shaping the
mud by hand and even allowing his small children to help him. "I had a
great deal of freedom," he said.
The authorities at the Seo cathedral in Palma, on the island of Majorca,
specified only that his 300 sq metre work should include a depiction of
Christ.
The painted ceramic skin which now permanently covers the walls of the
cathedral's Chapel of the Santísima is loosely based on the miracle of
the loaves and fishes, when Christ fed 5,000 people with five loaves of
bread and two fish.
Swirling shoals of fish and rolling waves are a reminder, the artist
said, that the 14th-century cathedral stands perched beside the
Mediterranean Sea.
The bishop who commissioned the work died in 2003 and is buried in the
chapel floor. "You could say he forms part of the foundations," Barceló
told the newspaper La Razón. The artist, who was born in Majorca, said
he had tried to respect the colouring and atmosphere of the cathedral,
painting the chapel windows in grey to keep a sombre tone. "The things
contemporary artists do in historical spaces are often a disaster," he said.
The cathedral's new bishop is delighted with the work. "It is a way of
bringing man closer to the mysteries of the beauty of God," said Bishop
Jesús Murgui. But although Barceló describes his work as "spiritual", it
has not converted him to Christianity. He will not be among those
queuing to take communion when the refurbished chapel is blessed today.