Tapies on Walls

Antoni Tapies describes the walls in his paintings as 'fundamentally a form of artistic organization.' (Tapies, 1970). He traces the source of his awareness of walls and their evocative power to his adolescence spent mainly shut in within walls during the Spanish Civil War, and recognises that his early works of 1945 'have an air of street graffiti and of an entire world of protest - repressed, clandestine, but also full of life.' (Tapies, 1970)

'How many suggestions can be derived from the image of the wall and all its possible permutations! Separation, cloistering, the wailing wall, prison, witness to the passing of time: smooth surfaces, serene and white; tortured surfaces, old and decrepit; signs of human imprints, objects, natural elements; a sense of struggle, of effort; of destruction, cataclysm; or of construction, reemergence, equilibrium; traces of love, pain, disgust, disorder; the romantic prestige of ruins; the contribution of organic elements, forms that suggest natural rhythms and the spontaneous movement of matter; a sense of landscape, the suggestion of the primordial unity of all things; generalized matter; affirmation of and esteem for the things of the earth; the possibility of a varied and combined distribution of great masses, a sense of falling, of the bottom falling out, of expansion, of concentration; the rejection of the world, inner contemplation, annihilation of the passions, silence, death; twisting and tortures, quartered bodies, human remains; the equivalent of sounds, clawings, scrapings, explosions, shots, blows, hammerings, cries, reverberations, echoes in space; meditation on a cosmic theme, reflections for contemplation of the earth, of the magma, of lava, of ash; battlefield; garden; playing field; the destiny of the ephemeral... ' (Tapies, 1970)

"Communication on the Wall"  translated by Mary Ann Newman from the Catalan, first published as "Communicado sobre el mur" in Antoni Tapies, La practica de l'art (Barcelona: Edicions Ariel, Esplugues de Llobregat, 1970), pp. 125  - 20., reproduced in Tapies, Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 1995.

Coincidentally, the word 'tapies' means wall in Spanish!