Antoni Tàpies, Tàpies in the 1960s - Scars of the Real

Growing up during the Spanish Civil War under the Franco regime, Antoni Tàpies was always surrounded by walls on which people inscribed their fears and doubts, their desires and frustrations. The walls of Tàpies’ youth bore witness to the horrors of the inhuman turn Spain and the entire world was taking at that time. They were charged with emotions—marked by violence, grief and the desperate longing for another world. After the Civil War, Tàpies felt the deep necessity to respond to the horrors that had changed his worldview and had made him question his own identity and that of the country he lived in. Becoming an artist was the only way to fully express himself.

Art doesn’t need to obey any laws or follow any rules. An artist can get away with violating the traditional norms and values of society, because he offers alternatives in a coded language that are rather felt than understood. An artist can hold a true mirror to the world in which it can see itself in its most primitive and original state. This world might not consciously be aware of what it’s looking at. At the same time, however, it’s already being transformed after a first glance.

Marked by the Catalan walls of his youth, Tàpies decided to start making paintings that acted as walls. Walls fascinated him, not only because they allow ideas and emotions to be scratched into matter over and over again, but because they also deny access and block vision. They are not—as the traditional painting is—a peaceful window to the world. A wall acts like a two-sided mirror in between two worlds. Whatever lies behind the wall can never be touched, but the wall itself, reflecting the crude reality of what is here, holds the promise of the existence of another side.

Tàpies’ works are eruptions of the Real that are silenced in a condensed, material message. When he made a painting, Tàpies engaged in a respectful, yet sometimes, violent dialogue with the pure nature of matter. He let his unconscious take over. He created the work in a permanent, open exchange with the true qualities of the rough and humble materials he was working with, without imposing any lies on them.

For Tàpies, making a painting meant diving into matter and going on a journey into its deepest, darkest, and most obscure recesses. A creative act resulted at the critical moment when he felt that the essence of matter converged with the essence of his own being. He experienced this moment as a mystic touching of the Real. Thus, his paintings bare the traces of the impact of an encounter with the Real, in all its beauty and cruelty.

The notion of the Real had dramatically changed after the wars. Among many artists, there was a total distrust of Western thought, which is based on rationality and logic, and forces us to categorise the world in dualities—spirit versus matter, creator versus creatures, soul versus body, idealism versus materialism, and so on. The Western definition of the Real is based on separation and on the unbridgeable gap between subject and object. Built upon concepts like nationalism and individualism, the wars had shown the dangerous results of Western logic, which made the world shatter into pieces.

Many post-war artists were looking for alternative ways of dealing with the Real. New developments in quantum physics and psychology had opened up to a wider understanding of reality, that got closer to the Eastern notion of the Real, which is based on the idea of an all connecting Oneness. The Tao speaks of one original principle—an emptiness that lies at the heart of everything and everyone. The Eastern Real is the primordial unity of all. It’s not one fixed point that can be grasped and distinguished from something else, but rather it’s a flux—an ever-evolving process of becoming.

The Real doesn’t exist, it only becomes. It resides in a permanent striving for communion between different poles (yin-yang), and not in the duality between them. In the Real, nothing is excluded or opposed. The paradox remains unresolved. The Eastern Real is not nameable, and cannot be explained by intellectual knowledge. It can only be sensed, briefly.

Tàpies’ paintings breathe this notion of the Eastern Real. His artistic language is the result of a continued meditative and creative process in which the artist’s body and soul (microcosm) merge with the Universe (macrocosm).

Tàpies presents the Real not only by abolishing the limits between matter and content, as explained above, but also in the guise of archetypical symbols that often came from his daily life (crosses, sticks, mathematical signs, etc.), but nevertheless carry a meaning that goes beyond their common, every day use. He intuitively selected and combined tangible elements that are rooted in our collective memory and re-used them in different constellations, and thus, inviting the viewer to continually re-interrogate what was given.

The meaning in Tàpies’ paintings is never univocal. It’s volatile, and requires a continual adjustment. It resides in a pre-verbal fluidity. Tàpies’ codes are undecipherable by the intellect. Rather than explainable representations of the outside world, they have become multiple realities on their own, built up out of fragments of the Real. They are lyrical spaces in which a non-verbal process of signification takes place which appeals to memory and emotion. Their code can only be “cracked” by approaching them with the senses, by making oneself vulnerable, open and courageous enough to face the mirror that shows authentic reality.

Looking at Tàpies’ paintings demands courage. They confront you with the deepest, darkest, and most primitive essences of a human being. They confront you on individual/physical and universal/meta-physical levels. As he explained himself, his paintings are silenced battlefields. Like the Catalan walls, they were scratched upon, violated and torn apart in order to open up, incarnate. They close the protective cocoon of our individual and collective subconscious. They reach us in our real, unconscious fears and desires. Not directly, but only sideways, in the guise of non-referential signs, marks and textures.

Tàpies’ walls are not pierced through, but remain confronting mirrors. They’re not showing, but rather, only holding the promise of another side. They don’t reveal the wounds of the battle, but they do reveal its scars. The shock of the wound would be unbearable. The scar, however, acts as a veiled hole, a healed wound.

The work of Tàpies in Scars of the Real, show the traces of a violent breaking though the wall. They keep the memory of the wound alive, while holding the comforting possibility, and hope, for healing.