Antoni Clavé. "Roi", 1957.

ANTONI CLAVÉ I SANMARTÍ (Barcelona, 1913 - Saint Tropez, France, 2005).
"Roi", 1957
Oil on cardboard mounted on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Signed, titled and dated on the back.
Galerie Taménaga label on stretcher frame.
Certificate of authenticity issued by the Antoni Clavé Archives will be given to the buyer.
Literature: Pierre Seghers, Clavé, Tudor Publishing Company, New York, 1972, p. 83, no. 67.
Provenance: Edgard Acosta Collection, Los Angeles.
Measurements: 105 x 75 cm.

In Roi, Antoni Clavé approaches one of the most emblematic motifs of his plastic universe: the figure of the king, an archetype that he repeats throughout his career as a field of formal and symbolic experimentation. In this work from 1957 -in the full maturity of the material period- the royal image dissolves in a dynamic network of signs, stains and chromatic planes that constantly oscillates between figurative suggestion and gestural abstraction.
The character's profile, barely insinuated by means of a dark and sinuous stroke, emerges from a dense background where matter is superimposed in layers. Incandescent reds, muted blues and deep blacks articulate a vibrant, almost tectonic space in which form seems to be born and extinguished at the same time. Above the head is a jagged structure that acts as a metamorphosed crown, a recurring iconographic element in Clavé, here reinterpreted with an ambiguous tone that oscillates between the ceremonial and the ironic.
Rather than representing an identifiable sovereign, Clavé creates a symbol of power as a mask, a figure eroded by time and matter. The roughness of the support, the material treatment and the visual fragmentation give the work a dramatic dimension that questions authority, revealing it as a fragile and theatrical construction. This tension between icon and visual dissolution makes Roi a paradigmatic example of the artist's poetics in the second half of the 1950s.

Antoni Clavé, trained at the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi, developed a career deeply marked by his experience in the Civil War and his subsequent exile to France. In Paris he came into contact with Vuillard, Bonnard and, especially, Picasso, whose influence was decisive in his evolution towards a personal language that fuses collage, matter and symbolism. Awarded prizes at the New York Hallmark (1948), the Venice Biennial (1954) and the Tokyo International Biennial (1957), he consolidated his international prestige before his recognition in Spain, which began with his exhibition at the Sala Gaspar in 1956.
His work, present in institutions such as the Tate Gallery, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao or the Reina Sofia Museum, is today considered fundamental in the renewal of Spanish art of the twentieth century.