Antoni Tàpies would have turned 100 today. An anniversary that is commemorated with an open day for the new exhibitions of the Fundació that bears his name and an opening ceremony in which Raimon, Jordi Savall and Marina Herlop will participate. It will be the starting signal for a centenary, the Tàpies Year, whose objective is to offer renewed readings of his work and place it back in the present. He is one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century, but his presence has been diluted with the passage of time. Does he continue to be a relevant figure for today’s creators? Does his work tell us anything about today’s world? La Vanguardia poses these questions to creators and curators of different generations.
“The objective of the centenary is to open a stage to the future by carrying out a tribute, but thinking about the entire legacy of Tàpies as an essayistic action. And that already requires talking about something that is alive, that is organic, that is thought. Thought It is always contemporary. Furthermore, when we talk about the work of artists of Tàpies’ caliber, they always gain meaning over the years. It is a work that always challenges us, that is always universal. There is a point at which the work always knows more than the artist, there are hidden meanings that are always there, because the artist is not aware of everything that happens at the moment he makes the work. For example, if we talk about the series of varnish works, for example, in Celebració of the mel, when we see these yellow varnishes, these corrosive liquids next to genital parts of the body, etc., you realize that when it was done, in ’89, AIDS was on the table. We are experiencing a change of epistemological paradigm and all his work has to be rethought, like that of many others. From a social, political, environmental and human point of view, it is a work that has only aged well.”
“Tàpies is that respect for the skin, for the land, for informalism… If we talk about validity or what it is contributing right now, I don’t feel that it is a very active presence. Although its philosophical background is, I believe which has already permeated many practices that are returning to look at the earth, at that space of silence that human beings find or are desperate to find. On the other hand, it is as if Tàpies had become real. This whole world of recycling, The sculptural part is the daily bread when you look at all the fiction that exists in what we call areas of conflict or the third world. We see that it is very current. That world that is becoming disordered, impoverished, falling into pieces. But at the level of language In terms of image, it is like we are at the other extreme. At this moment the manual part, the classic one, the one that allows you to make mistakes… I would even say that it is discredited, disempowered. I make people draw who do not have the learning academic and completely intuitive, there is a lot of Tàpies in the background. “That more guttural, more instinctive part, which is very healing.”
“Tàpies has a lot to say to today’s world. Basically I would say that there are three aspects that are absolutely relevant for younger artists. The first would be the idea of ??representation. If in Western art the representation, for example, of a landscape or of a person was always a representation of the other as an object, as someone who is outside, in the case of Tàpies, when you see how he presents, rather than represents, the imprint of a chair, of a foot… There is no separation between what that is seen, the matter and the figure. And when younger artists talk about working with non-humans, about the non-separation between humans and non-humans, the ideas that have to do with ecology, with territory, go a long way in that line. The second aspect is the idea of ??matter as something that is alive, for him there is no separation between matter and mind. The young creators are also in this non-separation between science, art, matter, a matter that is thought through the time she is alive. And the third has to do with the poetic aspect of his work where, let’s say, there is content with a political interest or a biographical interest. Teresa appears, the children appear, things about Catalonia and politics appear. In the nineties, during the war in Yugoslavia, he exhibited in Venice, and it shocked him that a few kilometers from the Biennale people were killing people. And he reflected all of that in a way that was never literal, but was poetic, it was enigmatic, it was spiritual… We are also in a paradigm shift where there is a whole series of Afro-descendant, diasporic, indigenous, non-Western voices, which are very powerful. and that provoke new readings of his work and allow us to see things that were not seen before and that make a lot of sense today.
“At the end of 2011, Toni, Antoni Tàpies’ son, called me to tell me that his father wanted to see me. Gathered in the living room of the family home on the appointed day, we spent several hours talking and sharing experiences and memories from that 1980 when we We met during my first exhibition at the Miró Foundation until our latest exhibitions and projects in different places around the world. At the end of the meeting, he wanted to accompany me to the door to say goodbye. It was a very emotional moment. He said, shaking my hand: If not! “We’ll see each other again, good luck! As if it were an omen, Antoni Tàpies left us two months later. His energy and friendship always remain in my memory.”
“After my readings on new materialisms by contemporary thinkers, such as Karen Barad, in The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, and Jane Bennett, author of Materia Vibrante, I think I see something very radical and very contemporary in Tàpies’ work. I want to see in Tàpies the rejection of the discourse of Cartesian, binary and hierarchical modernity: subject/object, culture/nature, animate/inanimate, human/animal, meaning/thing… that distances itself from the avant-garde artists, and, later , by some conceptual artists of the seventies. Their art opens the possibility of experiencing matter as the vibrant common to everything (and, therefore, at the same time close to Buddhism and quantum physics), where everything would be intertwined: sock, earth, stick, rag, rope, footprint. Could we see in Tàpies that ‘compost’ that Donna Haraway also tells us about?”
“Artists are born, create, die and leave their legacy. And it is posterity who must judge them.”
“He is obviously a very important artist, I have no doubt, but in my case, unlike what happened to me with Miró, I have never looked much at Tàpies. I am very struck by the appropriation that has been made of him, making him the official artist, I suppose even despite himself. He has had a lot of influence on painting. It does not arise from nothing, it is part of an international movement, informalism, the material, the importance of Zen, the reference to calligraphy oriental, all those things are typical of Tàpies and many others of his generation and all of that undoubtedly had great relevance at a certain time.
“From a personal point of view, it is true that at the beginning, when I started, for me it was a reference and now it is not. I believe that in that initial stage all Catalan artists have – or had, I don’t know what the younger ones will think now – Tàpies as a very strong, very important presence, who marked a lot and who, in some way, had to be overcome. And indeed there came a time when his work stopped being relevant to me. And I left it there, like an artist important, interesting, but he no longer contributed anything to my work and to the questions I asked myself. From a general point of view, he is still an important historical artist although I don’t know if he continues to influence the current debate now. I don’t dare say , but I have my doubts that he is marking the present. If I had to highlight something about him, it is his ability to continually invent. He did everything on a canvas. He experimented and worked in many ways, always being recognizable but at the same time very experimental. And that ability to renew itself, with greater or lesser success, is very relevant. His ability to investigate, to search, to not settle for what is already known. And take the work forward, into areas that I suppose were also unknown to him.”
“He is almost the Catalan povera and what interests me most is how he works with society’s waste. He has something of a flea market artist. I am also attracted by his role as a collector, seeing how his artistic universe is built through based on references to other artists that he collects, with whom he lives, with whom he is inspired, whether they are works of art or books. He is someone who has been part of my training, his relationship with the avant-garde, with Brossa, with other characters , because I am interested in history, this idea of ??stretching the threads of the past to continue building futures. But I am not sure that I am the artist of the moment, we are in another time.”
“I can only speak from humility and from my work, I cannot get into a garden that I do not pilot. Today I have been invited to participate with an intervention in which I try to draw in the air through whistling. And I also worked on the relationship between Tàpies and Brossa in Ganivet. I don’t feel him as someone distant, I have taken things from him that have resonated with me, such as the writing he uses in an encrypted way in his paintings, the way he marks the materials through indentations… The relationship between painting and sculpture, there are moments when you don’t know if it is one thing or another, those pieces that are like places… I recently learned about the history of the Mitjó that he designed for the Oval Room and looking at the plans I realized that what I had proposed was practically the same action that I carried out in Trena!”
