Introduction
The exhibition brings together two new bodies of work - a group of Marcel·la Barceló’s chromatic, figurative paintings that depict often solitary figures in dreamlike landscapes, with a collection of bronze and ceramic sculptures by Apollinaria Broche of lushly surreal, human-sized flowers and plants and diminutive sylvan creatures in various states of metamorphosis. The meeting of the works by these two artists with their mutually sympathetic thought-worlds, casts the show as a portal to an otherworldly place where human and more-than-human life and the mythic seamlessly intermingle as part of a dynamic, abundant and numinous whole.
Cultural context and influences
The exhibition takes its title from the eponymous essay by Edgar Allan Poe. One of his most ethereal texts, The Island of the Fay is a philosophical meditation in fictional form on the particular profundity of the solitary experience of the natural world and on the cycles of death and rebirth that shape existence. In it, the narrator discovers an enchanted island that is variously radiantly vital and somber and necrotic at either end and imagines it to be the last home on earth of Fays - sprites in other words. They end by recounting a vision in which they imagine the last of the Fays rapidly circling the island in a boat, in a metaphor of their lifecycle, until they finally fade from view. Poe’s The Island of the Fay forms part of a literary tradition of employing islands as allegories for consciousness, as in Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and is a text close to the heart of both artists.
Another point of cultural communion for the artists and one that influences the work in this show, is their respective love of multiple aspects of Japanese culture. It is a deep engagement that, collectively, encompasses traditional painting and ceramic arts, contemporary Japanese art, film and subcultures such as anime and manga and Japanese folklore, animism and Shinto. Marcel·la has visited and worked for extended periods in Japan many times and Broche has recently returned from a residency and exhibition in Tokyo.
On the works of Marcel·la Barceló in the show
The paintings that Marcel·la presents in the show are animated by a powerful sense of entwined dualities. Island of the Fay, (2024) with its purple-red sky and reflective expanse of water, is redolent with a still, mysterious and lunar quality. Morel (2024) meanwhile features a mysterious and inviting figure standing on the shoreline with their silhouette and the bright, abundant landscape behind, reflected in the expansive water in the foreground. There is a powerful sense of a holistic vitality in the scene. It recalls the fundamental belief of animism in its many manifestations, including in Shinto in which nature spirits, or kami are worshipped, an idea important to Marcel·la. Elsewhere, figures in several paintings, as in Le Complexe d’Ophélie (2024), hold yogic poses that in both form and name connect with nature and animals, symbolically hinting at the possibility of transformation that lies within us all. This line of thought and articulation find fuller, alchemically accented expression in Marcel·la’s painting of a mandrake, long associated with witchcraft, with a human head for a root. As always with Marcel·la’s work, the paintings here exhibit an impressive fluidity in their handling of form and, by turns, a delicate and powerful use of colour. Similarly to Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Marcel·la invites us to step through her paintings into another world.
On the works of Apollinaria Broche in the show
The several, human sized, beautifully surreal, bronze and ceramic flowering plant sculptures that Broche has planted in the gallery would likely find fertile homes in Marcel·la’s paintings. A similar sense of organic intelligence runs through these and Broche’s other works, compellingly shaped by a surreal sensibility reminiscent of modern artists such as Leonara Carrington and inspired by metamorphic folklore and myth. Having recently carried them back to Europe in her memory, here Broche sculpts ceramic flower forms inspired by flowers common to Japanese gardens and depicted in traditional Japanese flower calendars that chart the seasons in flowers and plants and elucidate their cultural meetings. The symbolism of colour is of great importance in Broche’s work. In previous bodies of her flower works, bright, vivid colours flourished. Here softer pastels and fading tones bloom - the shades and colours of nostalgia and fleeting memories. Dotted around the gallery and amongst the flower sculptures, Broche brings to life tiny sprite-like creatures, caught in moments as they fluidly move between their anthropomorphic and floral forms - the fays identified by Poe’s perhaps, liberated from his text. Like Barceló’s drawing of the mandrake-human, a form that unifies earth and sky, Broche offers us, installed towards the end of the main gallery space, a sculpture of a delicate, silver rope ladder that climbs into the ceiling - another portal allowing us to transcend our earthbound world and enter that of the imagination and spirit beyond - one of essential promises of art itself.
