Marcel·la Barceló

Starry Sea-urchin Night

Marcel·la Barceló (b. 1992, Palma de Mallorca, Spain) is a Catalan painter whose practice is shaped by a geographically and culturally plural trajectory, spanning the Balearic Islands, Paris, and Japan. This multiplicity informs a singular sensibility, where each landscape contributes to a visual and symbolic vocabulary rooted in an embodied experience of place. Her connection to the living world—particularly the sea and mountains of her insular childhood in Mallorca—constitutes a foundational dimension of her work.

Marcel·la adopts an intuitive, process-led approach, working without preparatory sketches. Her practice moves fluidly across materials—oil, acrylic, pencil, nail polish, and natural pigments— deployed in service of a tactile and immersive pictorial field.
Her compositions evoke environments of fluid instability: landscapes in perpetual transformation, animated by the sensation of metamorphosis. Water, a central and structuring element, transcends the role of motif to become a conceptual and spatial force. It shapes the mental architecture of the image, operating as a vehicle of change. Submerged islands, aquatic forests, and dreamlike reefs suggest immersion in a liquefied, amorphous space.

This mutable nature—charged with invisible energies—is mirrored in an organic, gestural language that seeks not to depict form but to evoke states of being. Within this floating world, spectral figures of young girls recur, reminiscent of the emblematic characters of Henry Darger or Marie Laurencin. Androgynous and diaphanous, these silhouettes inhabit a liminal zone—both present and dissolving, suspended in an ontological in-between. As anti-heroines within a non-linear narrative logic, they embody a state of identity-in-formation: fluid, provisional, and open-ended. Inspired by the spectral iconography of Japanese folklore—yūrei(¹) and ikiryō(²)—these apparitions retain a quiet agency: intermediaries or witnesses to an altered reality, their gaze oscillates between wonder and unease.

Barceló’s work engages myth and legend through the prism of the intimate, proposing a re-enchanted cosmogony animated by subterranean forces. Mutation and mystery converge in a vision of nature that is archaic, witch-like, and resistant to rational perception—revealing a fragile and elusive equilibrium of the living.

Rather than narrative sequences, her paintings function as rituals or mindscapes, where ancestral memory surfaces discreetly yet insistently. These spaces resonate with the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Barbara Grenfell Fairhead, the phenomenological poetics of Gaston Bachelard, and the mythic transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Her referential field moves between Félix Vallotton’s moon and sunsets, the existential intensity of Edvard Munch, and Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, in a visual language where fragility and turbulence coexist and crystallize in iridescent surfaces.(³)

(¹) Spirit from Japanese folklore, the soul of a deceased person unable to find rest.
(²) Wandering spirit of a living person, from Japanese belief, separated from the body under the influence of intense emotions.
(³) “ It is by lingering long enough on iridescent surfaces that one comes to understand the value of depth.” — Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard, José Corti Editions, 1942, p. 16