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拍品專文
Aglow with astral figures, forms, and symbols, Society Notes (Notes de societat) was painted by Antoni Tàpies in 1951, during what has come to be known as the artist’s ‘Magic Period.’ Over this half-decade Tàpies conjured atmospheric and fantastical visions of mythical creatures and intuitive, phantom-like figures. Incandescing spheres and pyramidal forms illuminate the hazy nocturnal scenes, and the works pulsate with a thrumming intensity. In the present work, a monumental female figure reclines in the foreground, Tàpies’ strokes so exquisitely delicate that she appears almost vaporous, while a series of luminous shapes and enigmatic symbols dance around her. At her feet, a similar ethereal silhouette clutches a gleaming white dagger, its tip positioned directly between the horns of a bull, while, at the centre of the composition, two hypnotising eyes stare out at the viewer from behind the bars of a cage.
For Tàpies, art itself was a kind of magic, and he sought to create paintings that had a direct personal impact on the viewer. Fascinated by medium and materialism, the artist felt that painting was a kind of alchemy – able to sublimate the ordinary, and make dreams a reality. In his belief in the transformative power of art, and its mystical ability to affect the individual consciousness, Tàpies was aligned with the Surrealists, whose works he had discovered in the late 1940s. It was at this same time that Tàpies and his friend Joan Brossa, the poet and playwright, became enraptured by magicians and conjurors, who they saw performing at fairs and carnivals. Indeed, Roland Penrose, a close associate of the 1930s Paris Surrealists, suggested that these magic shows, where conjurors would vanish and reappear in different places, inspired the transient sensation of the nebulous outlined figures that suffuse Tàpies’ paintings of this time.
Society Notes (Notes de societat) exudes a mysterious and magical essence, enhanced by the hallucinatory quality of the bursts of coloured lights, and the mesmerising interplay of light and shadow, which add an otherworldliness to the crepuscular scene. A sense of the enigmatic is further conjured by the esoteric obsidian images – the snake, the locked cage, the hourglass, the crescent moon, and the top hat. Tàpies valued the communicative and emotive power of visual imagery, and, throughout his oeuvre, used symbols and images to delve into the imaginative potential of picture-making. In the works of his ‘Magic Period,’ the symbols are cast throughout the composition, a kaleidoscopic arrangement which infused the paintings with a cosmic quality, revealing the influence of Joan Miró’s Constellations series, as well as the dreamlike expanses of Max Ernst’s landscapes.
For Tàpies, art itself was a kind of magic, and he sought to create paintings that had a direct personal impact on the viewer. Fascinated by medium and materialism, the artist felt that painting was a kind of alchemy – able to sublimate the ordinary, and make dreams a reality. In his belief in the transformative power of art, and its mystical ability to affect the individual consciousness, Tàpies was aligned with the Surrealists, whose works he had discovered in the late 1940s. It was at this same time that Tàpies and his friend Joan Brossa, the poet and playwright, became enraptured by magicians and conjurors, who they saw performing at fairs and carnivals. Indeed, Roland Penrose, a close associate of the 1930s Paris Surrealists, suggested that these magic shows, where conjurors would vanish and reappear in different places, inspired the transient sensation of the nebulous outlined figures that suffuse Tàpies’ paintings of this time.
Society Notes (Notes de societat) exudes a mysterious and magical essence, enhanced by the hallucinatory quality of the bursts of coloured lights, and the mesmerising interplay of light and shadow, which add an otherworldliness to the crepuscular scene. A sense of the enigmatic is further conjured by the esoteric obsidian images – the snake, the locked cage, the hourglass, the crescent moon, and the top hat. Tàpies valued the communicative and emotive power of visual imagery, and, throughout his oeuvre, used symbols and images to delve into the imaginative potential of picture-making. In the works of his ‘Magic Period,’ the symbols are cast throughout the composition, a kaleidoscopic arrangement which infused the paintings with a cosmic quality, revealing the influence of Joan Miró’s Constellations series, as well as the dreamlike expanses of Max Ernst’s landscapes.