Life
“Art is life” Antoni Tàpies once said in his reflection on the fact of artistic expression. Psychologist Ramon Bayés wrote that a person is his biography: the person begins at birth and ends in death, therefore, until we die our person is not finished and only once dead, when all our life is drawn, we have the whole person, not before. The painter Antoni Tapies died at age 88 on 6 February in Barcelona, the city where he was born and lived most of his life. His biography is already drawn, it has come to its end, so now it is the time to enjoy his work understanding the person who created it. As Ramon Bayés once wrote, the important time is the emotional time, the time that makes us feel happy or suffer, and it has no measure. In the work of Antoni Tapies we have a tragic sense of life, full of symbols that carry the least to the category of all. His time is now part of ours.
Antoni Tapies i Puig was born in Barcelona on December 23, 1923 at Canuda Street. His childhood was marked by a family atmosphere between the anticlerical and liberal rationalist father and the Catholicism of his mother. The Spanish Civil War brought to him the horror of the wounded in the bombings and the fear reflected on his mother’s face. In 1940 he suffered an accident that caused him a heart attack. He later suffered tuberculosis and was admitted to the Puig d'Olena sanatorium where he met the poet Carles Riba while he was visiting Catalonia clandestinely. His long stay in the hospital resulted in readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and especially The Book of Tea Kakuzo getting into the Zen philosophy.
After his sanatorium stage he began law studies but finally he abandoned them for painting in 1946. Then he had already discovered the Catalan avant-garde magazine D'Ací d'Allà, and flipped in the collage, the abstract art and the mixture of materials. In 1948 form with the poet Joan Brossa and the painters Joan Ponç, Modest Cuixart and Joan Josep Tharrats the Dau al set movement with a strong link with surrealist ideas in its early days giving the fruit of a magazine with the same title. But Antoni Tàpies soon broke away from the movement and went his own way, having a huge international impact throughout the fifties coming to participate in the exhibition at MoMA of New York dedicated to the new Spanish art in 1960. From there, Antoni Tàpies has been considered one of the most important artists of abstract art, along with Willem de Kooning and Pollock among others. Much of his work is divided between the most important contemporary art museums in the world, as the MoMA or the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Professor Diego Gracia says in his book Como arqueros al blanco that what drives every person is to achieve happiness and that we should not settle for less. Antoni Tàpies' response to what is probably the only question of existence, that is, how to get this happiness is the equalization of the minimum to the maximum. Everything is in everything, exactly the same way everything is in Tàpies, also with an undeniable tragic sense of life. Because there is no white light in Tàpies’ work but it has the darkness and the everyday life that contains all the light they absorb. In his dark tones we find all the light, also in his humble materials and its string and oxides, we find life, the effort to find this happiness and the wounded by the failed because of searching it in the wrong places. His symbols are minimal, the cross, the hands and nearby objects, chairs, socks, wrought iron. Happiness is near, and life is in us and in every aspect that surrounds us.
Catalan society has often been hard on his work. When he was commissioned a sculpture for the MNAC in Barcelona, Tàpies created El mitjó (The sock) of 18 meters, being rejected by most of society as a result of misunderstanding. Again an everyday object elevated to a higher category, something rejected by a society that is used to extol only simple grandeurs which are completely alien to them if not simply inexistent. Finally, the sculpture was reduced in dimensions to chair the Fundació Antoni Tàpies of which the artist was so proud. The country has not lived up to his talent, an art of thought-provoking suggestions and travelling the hieroglyph of life, suffering from uncertainty and searching for what lies beyond. The art of Tàpies is the cross of time’s face.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Jordi Socías from El País Semanal. All rights reserved.