Antoni Tàpies

ANTONI TÀPIES PUIG (Barcelona, 1923 - 2012).
"Creu vermella", ca.1970
Painting and pencil on cardboard.
Signed in the lower margin.
Attached certificate of the Comissió Tàpies.
Measurements: 43 x 62 cm; 70 x 90 cm (frame).

"Creu vermella" is a work fully representative of Antoni Tàpies' mature stage, a moment in which his material language and his symbolic universe reach an essential purification. The piece synthesizes three fundamental elements of his aesthetic: the humble support, the resounding sign and the energy of the gesture.
On a corrugated cardboard -a recurring material in his production due to its tactile quality and its "noble poverty"- Tàpies traces an intense red cross, applied with a broad, immediate gesture, charged with physicality. The thick, almost coarse brushstroke generates a vibration that contrasts with the fragility of the support, placing the viewer before the tension between the precarious and the transcendent, one of the constant poles of his work.
The cross, one of the most reiterated and significant signs in Tàpies' iconography, functions here as a universal and personal symbol at the same time. It is a sign of warning, a mark, a scratch, a wound, but also an axis, an encounter and an affirmation. Its visual power focuses attention on the gesture itself: an action that leaves a mark, that marks the pictorial territory as an act of presence.
Around the cross appear letters and numbers drawn in pencil - "a", "t", "1", "2"-, elements typical of Tàpies' "inner alphabet". Letters and numbers do not refer to a literal meaning but act as signs of thought, traces of writing, insinuations of a primordial language. The "t" inevitably evokes the artist's initial, but also the cruciform form; the "a" refers to origin; the numbers, to order and duality. All this creates an open symbolic field, deeply meditative.
"Creu vermella" is a work that masterfully condenses the essence of Tàpies: lay spirituality, powerful gestures, humble matter and transcendent sign. A paradigmatic example of his ability to transform the everyday into a space of revelation.

Antoni Tàpies is one of the leading figures of post-war European art and one of the great references of international informalism. Co-founder of the Dau al Set group and deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy, mysticism and everyday matter, he developed a unique language that combines gesture, texture and sign in a hybrid territory between the pictorial and the spiritual.
His international projection was consolidated in the 1950s, after his exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Since then, his work has been the subject of retrospectives in major museums around the world and is part of collections such as the MoMA, the Tate, the Guggenheim, the Reina Sofia, the MNAC and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.
His numerous awards include the Praemium Imperiale, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Grand Prix de Painting de France and the National Culture Award. His contribution to contemporary art is based on his ability to elevate humble matter to a transcendent category, creating a universal language based on the energy of gesture and the power of the symbol.