Sometimes a second look is all it takes. Almost three decades ago, I went to the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, but I was at a loss. I couldn’t work out what Antoni Tàpies’ huge abstract paintings made with clay and marble dust, chalk and earth, epoxy resin and varnish represented. In my ignorance, I couldn’t even appreciate their aesthetic qualities. So it was a particular pleasure to have seen his exhibition at the Bozar – I finally found Tàpies’ works beautiful, his self-taught skills and continuous reinvention impressive and the political meaning instructive and moving. Antonio Tàpies has a unique voice.
Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) was a fine draughtsman and painter. His self-portraits from 1945 include one made of only a dozen elegant lines of ink; another uses hundreds of nervous strokes. His 1950 self-portrait used beautiful, life-giving oil. We see a man at the beginning of his remarkable career.
This is where easy appreciation ends. In the exhibition there was a brown rectangle with two roundish dents at the base of the textured surface and a rectangle at the top. From close-up – abstract textured shapes. Somehow interesting. I held off from looking at the label and tried to see what was there. The dents looked like heal marks. I stood back. Was the rectangle at the top a flat pillow? I finally peered at the label. Yes – Brown Bed (1960). The next abstract rectangle was White Sheet (1965). I was glad I tried to work them out before the mystery was solved by artwork titles. Art is, of course, much more than a “guess what this is”. These are somehow beautiful, like Rothko’s, almost. They are an exploration of materials, colours and textures, a call for us to appreciate the beauty of the banal and see art in the everyday. Like poetry – slowing down to capture the moment. Alternatively, you can choose to build on what is there. The brown bed looked like a bronze from a church, where the statue honouring the dead has upped and left only heel prints as a proof of existence. The patch of lighter brown perhaps suggests a light-shadow of shoulders and chest now gone. A body, too, left the crumpled sheet. But why the knotted corners? Are knots symbols in his language like crosses?
Antoni Tàpies also captured a foot, an armpit, a torso, a head in his painting. The torso was not immediately a torso; it only emerged by staring at it for a minute, then its identity was confirmed by the little label (always read them after staring at the artwork), and it clicked in place. I looked again. The torso intrigued me; it could have been an imprint of a body on an ancient shroud. What was Tàpies getting at?
In his painting of the head, the dried varnish forms coral patterns, brain structures on the outside. A black symbol of a cross pierces the eye. There is no hint of meaning on the label, just “Head and Varnish (1990)”. Blinded by religion or blinded by the church are two possible interpretations. Or simply a lament at the sight of death. Physicists and film producers talk of multiple parallel universes; perhaps it is so with painting: multiple meanings, all real at the same time.
Antoni Tàpies lived under Franco’s authoritarian rule that ended Catalonia’s short spell of self-government (1931 to 1939) and waged a repressive cultural war from 1939 to 1975, where Catalan and democratic freedoms were repressed; only Castilian (Spanish) was allowed. During this period, Tàpies was sent to prison and sentenced to death. No, the exhibition didn’t stop abruptly. Fortunately, the death sentence was lifted, but not on all. His work captures the political reality of totalitarian rule. The red stripes of the Catalonian flag are presented in the first painting from his time in prison, and the red shirt in a black-painted box, like a community-sized coffin, is a symbol of those who were not as lucky as he and were executed.
Shirt (1972) © Patrick ten Brink
We now live in times where authoritarian regimes are emerging, repression is becoming a norm in too many countries, and death is everyday news. But the everyday doesn’t mean it is okay to accept this horrific, hopefully short-lived, new normal. Antoni Tàpies didn’t. He railed against injustices during Franco’s authoritarian rule and against wrongs elsewhere – such as the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1995. His Dukkha (1995), with its amputated leg, demonstrated his “disillusionment, suffering, emptiness, tension”. I don’t know what Tongue (1992) represented for Antoni Tàpies, but for me, it symbolizes the desire not to be muzzled, a warning of the dangers to the freedom of expression. The hole and the anguished lips suggest the battle against free speech he faced during the Franco years – unfortunately, all too evident in regimes across the world, where press freedoms and rights to demonstrate are being curtailed. We don’t need bullet wounds to our organs of speech. We need more artists like Antoni Tàpies in these turbulent times, shedding honest and angry light on reality and being the people’s conscience beating out the truth painting by noisy painting.
As ever, these few words can hardly do justice to his immense work and the wonderful exhibition at the Bozar until 7 January 2024 – with its beauty, its research into raw materials, its political warnings. Go and see Tàpies’ unique voice.
