Screening 2 Terres
« Terres Barceló », Christian Tran, 2015, 75 min.

In 2016, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée Picasso joined forces and together invited the visual artist Miquel Barceló to create work in the two French institutions. In the former, he covered over 1000m2 of the building’s glass walls with fresh clay, which he scraped, rubbed, scratched, and smeared around, forming animal and human figures in a kind of monumental wall fresco. In the underground level of the latter, the artist built a wall of bricks that he had previously sculpted, crushed, and made holes in to produce a multitude of faces. In the months leading up to the show opening, the filmmaker Christian Tran recorded the on-site creation of Barceló’s temporary artworks. Tran’s documentary plunges viewers into the artist’s creative ferment, his almost carnal connection with ancestral art materials, and his relationship to time.