MEXICO CITY, MEXICO.- Museo Rufino Tamayo presents Miquel Barceló, on view through August 7, 2005. Works by Miquel Barceló usually have a supernatural strength capable of achieving the essence of the object represented by displaying the pictorial material itself. It is simple to observe how conventional representation of the object has progressively become less relevant with the passing of time. The pictorial process itself is now the true protagonist of a search whose horizon consists of the expansion and surpassing of this representation, in order to refer us to the principles of its reason for being.

More than two decades of work implacably impelled this remarkable artist to confront his most intimate aesthetic conscience with the obscure origins that constituted its driving force. To that end, he developed a conscious process of research, as rational as it was intuitive, thereby embarking on an undertaking so ambitious that it proves difficult to explain in terms of conventional analysis.

Past projects by this artist gave a more fragmented view of the art/life concept; now Miquel Barceló prefers a language that generates what had never previosly been seen inthe large and eternal compartments of our memory; the earth covered with vegetation, the seabed, the sky, beaches, waves, caves. All these metaphors are sufficiently deep and wide-ranging in order to contain his intention, in such a way that the mystery of the most essential pictorial truth is revealed to us in its most extensive, unlimited sense.

Nothwithstanding the constant presence of death in his work, Miquel Barceló does not appear to be obsessed by a final or apocalyptical view of the practice of art. On the contrary, for him it seems like an embryo of what can be generated in the formation of an internal ocean or within the bowels of the earth. This is because every great artist is in possession of a great truth. The crash of an encyclopaedia falling to the floor would be silenced by that darker, denser and firmer knowledge with which Miquel Barceló confronts us in his latest works.