Antoni Tàpies was greatly influenced by Eastern spirituality and especially by Zen Buddhism, with which he connected very early through reading a book from his father’s library, El llibre del te, published in Catalan during the Republic. Years later he would remember a Taoist fable that he read in those pages and that for him symbolized the great contribution of Buddhism to modern art. He spoke of a very tall and very leafy tree, whose branches touched the stars and the roots reached to the center of the earth. One day a magician turns it into a harp and the emperor, who keeps it as a treasure, asks various musicians to play it. But none of them manage to get a melody out of it until the prince of artists arrives and the harp begins to speak of the tree’s memories. The emperor asks him “how have you managed to make music with this harp that resists all the other artists in the kingdom?” “Because I have not imposed any melody on it, I have let it speak.” “This story will be relevant in Tàpies’ work and in fact in all modern art, due to the active role it gives to the viewer as someone who completes the interpretation of the works,” says Núria Homs, Tàpies’ curator. The imprint of Zen, with which the Fundació Tàpies begins today with an open day to commemorate the artist’s centenary.
The exhibition coincides in time with A=A, B=B, an exhibition that, led by young artists selected by the creator and scientist Pep Vidal, brings us closer to another aspect of his production that has not been studied too much: his interest in science. , which led him to collect great scientific works with the passion of a bibliophile.
Tàpies. The Trace of Zen, which occupies two floors of the Fundació Tàpies with forty works, fifteen of them unpublished, is the first exhibition that addresses the artist’s connection with Buddhism, a current that runs through all of his work, especially from the eighties, when he recovered the brush stroke and the gesture, the calligraphy and the images that the Buddhist monks treated (mountainous landscapes, animals, mushrooms…), the traces (“Buddha said that he did not want to be represented with his image but with those traces that had left their passage through life,” recalls the curator), they take on especially relevance in their production.
Also self-portraits. In one from 1992, which was presented to the world for the first time. Tàpies is represented with his eyes closed and needing glasses, with the cross, the words “a” and “t”, with four fingerprints, half curled up and with his ass in the air. At the bottom you can read “ALTRE COP SOBRE LA TELA”. Homs relates it to the article La condició d’artista, published a year later, which he heads with an inscription by the Japanese Buddhist monk Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768): “This bald, blind and stinking head appears again on the paper.” .
“There is a lot of sense of humor and critical spirit,” agrees the curator, who specifies that the Buddhism that will interest Tàpies, like other great European and North American artists, especially after the Second World War, is the one that “since the 16th century In the 19th century, due to wars between rival clans, it became marginal and lived a golden age as a counterculture, with a critical attitude towards its own culture and towards the dominant power. It is that rebellious spirit that bound Tàpies and also captured Miró, Pollock, Philip Guston, Yves Klein, John Cage…”
In the basement, A=A, B=B, a title that Pep Vidal takes from an inscription that appears in Blau emblemàtic, also present in the exhibition, brings together twelve creators around the idea of ??“how sometimes we approach something In this case, science, which is very far away from us, can explain things to us that we cannot understand. And at that moment we are making an act of faith, we accept that what he is telling us is true, we have to believe it because we do not have the capacity to refute it,” argues the commissioner.
An act of faith like the one proposed by Mariona Moncunill, who films the Helsinki botanical garden completely covered in snow while a worker explains the species that live under the white blanket. Or Michelle in Canada, by the artist and writer Irene Solà, who asks a student to think about the memories of the house in which she grew up, inaccessible to the viewer, who has to settle for the expression on the concentrated face of she. The exhibition is completed with works by Daniel Bejar, Lúa Coderch, Violeta Mayoral, Tanit Plana, John Baldesari or, among others, Jorge Carrión, who travels to Sankt Gallen, in Switzerland, scene of a series of talks on science and philosophy in the fifties under the motto New vision of the world, later collected in a book that Tàpies kept on his nightstand.
The start of the Tàpies Year will have an inaugural event from the afternoon in which Raimon will participate, with performances by Jordi Savall and Marina Herlop., while in the morning, in addition to free entry to the exhibitions, eight artists will recreate various episodes of the autobiographical texts collected in Personal memory: Laia Estruch (11 a.m.), Mohamad Bitari (11.30 a.m.), Ihosvanny Cisneros (12 p.m.), Laura Alcalà (12.30 p.m.), Fèlix Pons (1 p.m.), Agnès Pe (1 pm), Fito Conesa (2 pm) and Vignesh Melwani (2.30 pm).
