In 1985, Jean Marie del Moral entered Miquel Barceló’s Parisian studio for the first time to take his portrait. The photographer’s way of working, discreet and silent, as if he were not there, has meant that, since that first session forty years ago, Barceló has had the doors of his creative process open to him, whether in Barcelona, Paris, Mali, Artà, Palermo or Vilafranca de Bonany. In the words of the photographer himself, with the work carried out over these forty years he wanted to ‘write a novel with photographs, a novel immersed in the silences of the workshop’ that bears witness to the artistic evolution of the painter.
In 1985, Toni Catany took a portrait of Miquel Barceló in his Parisian studio. He had already portrayed him before, in Portocolom and in Paris, and almost at the end of his life he would return to the painter’s studio, this time in Vilafranca, to portray his ceramics. Today, Catany’s and del Moral’s visions of Barceló happily converge in Llucmajor thanks to del Moral’s donation of a selection of his work to the Toni Catany Foundation, which opens to the public in February 2025 to coincide with the presentation of the documentary Measure of silence. Jean Marie del Moral – Miquel Barceló by Cesc Mulet (La Periférica Produccions and Allegra Films), in an expansion of the exhibition ‘Toni Catany. Portraits and ceramics by Miquel Barceló’.
‘Our days are full of successes and of things we miss; this is the perfect metaphor for life, and that is extraordinary, but it happens that we live in a world where we want everything, all the time. Sometimes I see something that interests me, but I don’t photograph it. Because sometimes, for whatever reason, out of respect, you don’t photograph things. And I know it’s an extraordinary photo… and I’m not taking it’.
Jean Marie del Moral
‘Maybe the best photos are the ones I have never taken.
In India I saw a teenager painted blue riding a bicycle with another friend. I would have loved to photograph them, but it was not possible.
That photo is still in my head’.
Toni Catany