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拍品专文
'For some time now, since the death of my father, I had had my studio in a set of rooms, first in a flat in Carrer Saragossa which Teresa's uncle and aunt had lent us, and then in my mother's house, but always in cramped conditions full of drawbacks. The disorder and lack of space in both places was something I could endure no longer. After fourteen or fifteen years of working in small, badly lit rooms, the need to get a 'proper' studio became imperative.' (cited in Anna Agusti, Tàpies: The Complete Works, vol 2, Barcelona 1990, p. 474).
Rosa con Franja Negra is a large and important work executed shortly after Tàpies had moved into his splendid new house/studio in Barcelona in 1963. Spanning nearly two metres in length it is one of the larger format paintings the artist had been longing to make for some time as well as being comparatively rare in Tàpies' oeuvre for its dominant use of a warm and subtle pink colour and texture.
Executed in a variety of media centred around a rectangular block of sand stuck and built onto the surface of the canvas, the painting describes a textural landscape in the form of a wall or mattress-like panel that seems to stand on the threshold between two worlds. One is the world of appearance and of perceptual understanding, the other, a world of material comprehension that responds to and articulates the action, manipulation, gesture and living nature of the artist.
Clawing, scraping, pasting, cutting, breaking, incising, and disrupting the billions of particles that make up the sandy material surface of his paintings Tàpies' builds them into wall-like panoramic relief paintings. It is neither the visual aesthetics of the work nor the thing itself that is important for Tàpies, but the ability of the work to act as a medium for contemplation. Tàpies' surfaces are like walls in that they are dividing lines between two states of understanding. They both repel and invite contemplation. Landscapes of psychic interaction between man and material, and between man as dust and also dust as dust, the slight ephemeral, transient but ultimately profoundly meaningful marks that Tàpies makes score the infinite but also material space that is manifested in front of the viewer in the form of a more or less flat painterly surface. Like a wall this surface both bounds, blocks and borders at the same time that it offers itself as a contemplative opening - a window or a door - onto another world. It is, as Tàpies' intuitive interaction with his materials ultimately brought him to understand, an entire universe of activity and interaction that, for the artist especially, offers an exciting and new world of play and discovery.
As Tàpies recalled in 1969 of his intuitive way of working with material in this way, 'I tried to arrive at silence directly, more resignedly, offering myself up to the fate that governs all profound struggle. Those millions of furious clawings were transformed into millions of grains of dust of sand. A whole new landscape, as in the story of one who goes through the looking glass, opened before me as if to communicate the most secret innerness of things. The symbolism of dust - 'to become one with dust, this is the deep identity, that is to say, the internal depth between man and nature' (Tao te King) - and of ash, of the earth whence we come and to which we return, of the solidarity that is born on realising that the differences between us are no greater than those that exist between one grain of sand and another and the most sensational surprise was to discover one day, suddenly, that my paintings, for the first time in history had turned into walls.' (Antoni Tàpies, 'Communication on the Wall,' 1969, in Antoni Tàpies in Perspective, exh. cat., Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona, 2004, p. 76).
For Tàpies, the wall-like quality of his work prompted a profound recognition of his art making a deep connection with himself. when, sheltering from the violence on the streets of Barcelona during the civil war he had not only been enclosed by them for long periods, but, in the evening, had witnessed the ravages of the day's external events written on the dusty street walls of his city. The scratches, graffiti, bullet holes, and other surface damage all seemed to betray and describe the momentous events of the day that Tàpies had otherwise only heard. This, in addition to the fact that the Catalan word wall is encapsulated in the name 'Tàpies', led to Tàpies' close identification with the wall as a powerful tool and conveyer of meaning. When, in the late 1950s he also learned that 'the work of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, was called Contemplation of the Wall at Mahayana, and that the Zen temples had sand gardens forming striations or fringes similar to the furrows of some of my paintings aAnd that in Buddhist meditation, they also seek the support of certain kasinas that sometimes consist of earth placed in a frame, in a hole, in a wall, in charred matter' Tàpies was moved to recognise what he called 'a proud kinship between me and those philosophies and wisdoms I so esteemed.' (Ibid, p. 79).
Rosa con Franja Negra, formerly in the private collection of Tàpies' American dealer, Martha Jackson, is a warm panoramic wall-like painting that self-manifests its own gentle materiality. In doing so it highlights this mystical sense that in intuitively manipulating the material, Tàpies is also demonstrating something of the fundamental and universal relationship between the individual and the collective that takes place within every action. With its broad expanse of warm red-painted sand patterned like a mattress across the horizontal expanse of the picture frame, the overt materiality of the painting, incised and punctured in a subtle but systematic way, stresses the living action of an individual through the rupture in its solidity. At the very centre of the painting Tàpies has signed the work by marking his own individual and human presence into the sand with a cross and a pair of finger-print marks that look more like small footprints lost in the desert of the painting's vast rose-tinted landscape of matter. 'When I paint a sign, an X or cross' Tàpies has said, 'I experience a certain satisfaction. I see that the picture receives a real force with this sign.' (cited in Antoni Tàpies: Recent Works, exh. cat., Pace Gallery, New York, 1993 p. 7). Transforming the wall into a life-size bed-like space by demarcating the horzontal dimensions of the work with a line and a sequential stitching-like progression of dots, the painting seems to exist in several different dimensions of understanding. These are all pinned and centred by the small but sharply incised cross and prints at the centre of the work which undeniably demonstrates the vitality and living presence of the artist interacting at the very heart of this vast, mysterious and highly impersonal expanse of raw matter.
Rosa con Franja Negra is a large and important work executed shortly after Tàpies had moved into his splendid new house/studio in Barcelona in 1963. Spanning nearly two metres in length it is one of the larger format paintings the artist had been longing to make for some time as well as being comparatively rare in Tàpies' oeuvre for its dominant use of a warm and subtle pink colour and texture.
Executed in a variety of media centred around a rectangular block of sand stuck and built onto the surface of the canvas, the painting describes a textural landscape in the form of a wall or mattress-like panel that seems to stand on the threshold between two worlds. One is the world of appearance and of perceptual understanding, the other, a world of material comprehension that responds to and articulates the action, manipulation, gesture and living nature of the artist.
Clawing, scraping, pasting, cutting, breaking, incising, and disrupting the billions of particles that make up the sandy material surface of his paintings Tàpies' builds them into wall-like panoramic relief paintings. It is neither the visual aesthetics of the work nor the thing itself that is important for Tàpies, but the ability of the work to act as a medium for contemplation. Tàpies' surfaces are like walls in that they are dividing lines between two states of understanding. They both repel and invite contemplation. Landscapes of psychic interaction between man and material, and between man as dust and also dust as dust, the slight ephemeral, transient but ultimately profoundly meaningful marks that Tàpies makes score the infinite but also material space that is manifested in front of the viewer in the form of a more or less flat painterly surface. Like a wall this surface both bounds, blocks and borders at the same time that it offers itself as a contemplative opening - a window or a door - onto another world. It is, as Tàpies' intuitive interaction with his materials ultimately brought him to understand, an entire universe of activity and interaction that, for the artist especially, offers an exciting and new world of play and discovery.
As Tàpies recalled in 1969 of his intuitive way of working with material in this way, 'I tried to arrive at silence directly, more resignedly, offering myself up to the fate that governs all profound struggle. Those millions of furious clawings were transformed into millions of grains of dust of sand. A whole new landscape, as in the story of one who goes through the looking glass, opened before me as if to communicate the most secret innerness of things. The symbolism of dust - 'to become one with dust, this is the deep identity, that is to say, the internal depth between man and nature' (Tao te King) - and of ash, of the earth whence we come and to which we return, of the solidarity that is born on realising that the differences between us are no greater than those that exist between one grain of sand and another and the most sensational surprise was to discover one day, suddenly, that my paintings, for the first time in history had turned into walls.' (Antoni Tàpies, 'Communication on the Wall,' 1969, in Antoni Tàpies in Perspective, exh. cat., Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona, 2004, p. 76).
For Tàpies, the wall-like quality of his work prompted a profound recognition of his art making a deep connection with himself. when, sheltering from the violence on the streets of Barcelona during the civil war he had not only been enclosed by them for long periods, but, in the evening, had witnessed the ravages of the day's external events written on the dusty street walls of his city. The scratches, graffiti, bullet holes, and other surface damage all seemed to betray and describe the momentous events of the day that Tàpies had otherwise only heard. This, in addition to the fact that the Catalan word wall is encapsulated in the name 'Tàpies', led to Tàpies' close identification with the wall as a powerful tool and conveyer of meaning. When, in the late 1950s he also learned that 'the work of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, was called Contemplation of the Wall at Mahayana, and that the Zen temples had sand gardens forming striations or fringes similar to the furrows of some of my paintings aAnd that in Buddhist meditation, they also seek the support of certain kasinas that sometimes consist of earth placed in a frame, in a hole, in a wall, in charred matter' Tàpies was moved to recognise what he called 'a proud kinship between me and those philosophies and wisdoms I so esteemed.' (Ibid, p. 79).
Rosa con Franja Negra, formerly in the private collection of Tàpies' American dealer, Martha Jackson, is a warm panoramic wall-like painting that self-manifests its own gentle materiality. In doing so it highlights this mystical sense that in intuitively manipulating the material, Tàpies is also demonstrating something of the fundamental and universal relationship between the individual and the collective that takes place within every action. With its broad expanse of warm red-painted sand patterned like a mattress across the horizontal expanse of the picture frame, the overt materiality of the painting, incised and punctured in a subtle but systematic way, stresses the living action of an individual through the rupture in its solidity. At the very centre of the painting Tàpies has signed the work by marking his own individual and human presence into the sand with a cross and a pair of finger-print marks that look more like small footprints lost in the desert of the painting's vast rose-tinted landscape of matter. 'When I paint a sign, an X or cross' Tàpies has said, 'I experience a certain satisfaction. I see that the picture receives a real force with this sign.' (cited in Antoni Tàpies: Recent Works, exh. cat., Pace Gallery, New York, 1993 p. 7). Transforming the wall into a life-size bed-like space by demarcating the horzontal dimensions of the work with a line and a sequential stitching-like progression of dots, the painting seems to exist in several different dimensions of understanding. These are all pinned and centred by the small but sharply incised cross and prints at the centre of the work which undeniably demonstrates the vitality and living presence of the artist interacting at the very heart of this vast, mysterious and highly impersonal expanse of raw matter.