Antoni Tàpies
Gran díptic roig i negre, 1980
(Large Red and Black Diptych)
Mixed media on wood, 270 x 440 cm
There is sufficient information, some provided by Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, Spain, 1923–2012), that associates part of his work – defined as a wall where things happen and recurring signs appear) – with his name. Tàpies, which translates to Spanish as tapias (walls), refers to the canvases of the wall; to the surfaces that simultaneously join and separate a plot of land or that raise barriers and are also supporting structures for the gesture, for criticism, for a name or initial, for symbols or for the testimony of someone who was there and left his or her mark. Within this apparently childlike or basic naming game, there lies an essential question regarding the identity of the artist: of an infancy and adolescence marked by illness, and of grey walls observed through windows. There are other pictorial and ideological motifs, also expressed by him in the 1990s, in the use of inappropriate materials borrowed from other worlds that are less inclined towards the concept of pictorial taste in vogue during the postwar period in Spain. "That predilection for special or unusual materials was also the result of opposition to what was official art at that time; the style of painting that came out of academies or Postimpressionism, which was fashionable at that time in my city. Obviously, I found that kind of art to be repugnant in a way, which I expressed with the use of odd materials".
His radical departure from the context is seen in the use of colours that were far removed from the lively tones that characterised the preceding generation of artists. For Tàpies, grey represented an "internalised" colour that evoked "semi-darkness; the light of dreams and of our inner world". Brown held Franciscan connotations reminiscent of excrements and faeces, "which, in essence, is also a Franciscan idea". Both colours and their hues and tones take on characteristics of a philosophical nature. In any case, they generate surfaces that are coarse and rough, in which the materials play the prominent role of speaking for themselves and to each other. They are background and foreground; staging and actors. They are surfaces on which symbols are shown, such as crosses or Xs; letters, especially A (for Antoni) and T (for Tàpies, but also his wife Teresa), but also M (for mountain and muerte, which means death in Spanish); numbers that have to do with the infiniteness of the universe and the numerical potential of its definition; or forms such as stairs or doors that access or block psychological situations and sometimes dreamscapes.
Gran díptic roig i negre (Large Red and Black Diptych) contains some of these features only briefly named above, along with other essential references. As a diptych, several actions are depicted as a whole: a gaze in a mirror; the appearance of a double as a necessary counterpart in terms of forms and materials but also as a means of reflecting the possibility of a being and its shadow. Without showing a mirrored repetition, there is spacial continuity in the painting’s main form: the light surface (perhaps a floor plan, a concentrated cross, etc.) surrounded by blackness. This blackness covers the left side of the diptych, extending the light form with its outline. On its upper-right side, it requires a square of the same colour as that of the stain on the right. This produces a yin and yang on the canvas, which is shown once again with the triangle formed by the lower-right corner. References to Eastern cultures soon became a constant in Tàpies’ works. He found in these theories a means of personal internalisation that fit his way of observing and understanding the world. The T on the left side (dark) and another letter that may be an A or an S on the right side (light), coexist with a classic Latin cross at the centre of both parts and Xs on the upper sides that seem to lend greater stability to the overall composition. Like a red suture (a play on semantics, between wound and suture), crimson brushstrokes appear in the central space between both halves of the diptych, as if they were joining them. It is the artist’s only primary colour in this piece and in a large part of his vast and fundamental oeuvre. In the context of what was called Informalism at the time, Tàpies’s relevance was far greater than anyone could have imagined. Arguably, he was among the most decisive Spanish artists of the art scene of the 20th century.

References
Tàpies: comunicació sobre el mur, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1992.
Tàpies, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía / Aldeasa, Madrid, 2000.
Campo cerrado: arte y poder en la posguerra española, 1939–1953, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía,
Madrid, 2016.
Á. de los Ángeles