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拍品专文
‘I regard mysticism as a state of mind which is necessary to scientific thinking, as well as to art: it enables one to discover things which cannot be found by other means’
ANTONI TÀPIES
Confronting the viewer like an ancient relic, Antoni Tàpies’ Tot marró amb rellen (All Brown with Relief) trembles with raw material power. Rising from the surface of the canvas in rough-hewn, granular layers, the work resembles a slab of crumbling earth or fragment of a faded mural, muddied and fractured with the scars of time. Executed in 1961, during a period of growing international acclaim for the artist, it belongs to the series of so-called ‘matter’ paintings that first developed in the mid-1950s and would occupy him throughout his career. Materially grounded yet metaphysically conceived, these works constitute a profound enquiry into the spiritual properties of earthbound media. Fascinated by the notion of human trace, Tàpies was deeply influenced by the weatherbeaten, war-torn walls of his native Catalonia, and the ghosts that quivered within their silent, stony forms.
‘The mystical consciousness – almost indefinable – seems fundamental for an artist’, he explained. ‘It is like a “suffering” of reality, a state of constant hyper-sensitivity to everything that surrounds us, good and bad, light and darkness. It is like a voyage to the centre of the universe which furnishes the perspective necessary for placing all things of life in their real dimension’ (A. Tàpies, ‘I am a Catalan’, 1971, reproduced in K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds)., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1996, p. 56). In his bid to glimpse the external forces that underpin the material world, Tàpies assumed the role of medium, channelling the invisible fluctuations of the cosmos. In the present work, signs of physical presence hover in thick, fossilised layers, heavy with the untold mysteries of their making.
ANTONI TÀPIES
Confronting the viewer like an ancient relic, Antoni Tàpies’ Tot marró amb rellen (All Brown with Relief) trembles with raw material power. Rising from the surface of the canvas in rough-hewn, granular layers, the work resembles a slab of crumbling earth or fragment of a faded mural, muddied and fractured with the scars of time. Executed in 1961, during a period of growing international acclaim for the artist, it belongs to the series of so-called ‘matter’ paintings that first developed in the mid-1950s and would occupy him throughout his career. Materially grounded yet metaphysically conceived, these works constitute a profound enquiry into the spiritual properties of earthbound media. Fascinated by the notion of human trace, Tàpies was deeply influenced by the weatherbeaten, war-torn walls of his native Catalonia, and the ghosts that quivered within their silent, stony forms.
‘The mystical consciousness – almost indefinable – seems fundamental for an artist’, he explained. ‘It is like a “suffering” of reality, a state of constant hyper-sensitivity to everything that surrounds us, good and bad, light and darkness. It is like a voyage to the centre of the universe which furnishes the perspective necessary for placing all things of life in their real dimension’ (A. Tàpies, ‘I am a Catalan’, 1971, reproduced in K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds)., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1996, p. 56). In his bid to glimpse the external forces that underpin the material world, Tàpies assumed the role of medium, channelling the invisible fluctuations of the cosmos. In the present work, signs of physical presence hover in thick, fossilised layers, heavy with the untold mysteries of their making.