Antoni Clavé

ANTONI CLAVÉ I SANMARTÍ (Barcelona, 1913 - Saint Tropez, France, 2005)
"Poisson still life. 1961.
Oil and collage on paper and on canvas.
Work reproduced in the catalog "Clavé. Pierre Seghers. Ed. Polígrafa, page 538.
Attached certificate of authenticity issued by the Unión Patrimonial de Arte S.A. (Uniarte).
Presents on the back label of the Gaspar room and Uniarte Barcelona.
Measurements: 105 x 75 cm; 109 x 78 cm (frame).
This painting is inscribed in a decisive moment of Clavé's career, when the Catalan artist, already settled in France for more than a decade, consolidated a fully personal language within the European material abstraction. In this painting, the compositional structure is articulated by means of wide chromatic fields, dense greens, deep blacks and bursts of red, which form a fragmented, almost theatrical space, in which the figurative allusions to the supposed still life of fish are dissolved in gestures, textures and graphic traces. The material character of the surface, reinforced by the combination of opaque pigments, scratches and linear strokes of spontaneous appearance, refers to the experimentation that Clavé was then developing in dialogue with neo-expressionist tendencies and with the post-war European informalist heritage.
During this stage, Clavé explored an aesthetic territory marked by the superimposition of layers, the use of non-traditional materials and an almost archeological approach to the support, where each layer of paint functions as a vestige that reveals or conceals latent forms. In "Poisson still life", the allusion to the classic still life theme is not presented as a mimetic representation, but as a decomposed echo that emerges between stains and gestural rhythms. This procedure reflects the artist's desire to dissociate himself from conventional figuration without renouncing the memory of historical pictorial genres, thus integrating tradition and modernity on the same plane. In the early sixties, Clavé was deeply immersed in research on pictorial matter and in the expansion of his language towards the graphic arts and scenography, disciplines whose influence can be perceived in the scenic, almost spatial quality of his compositions. The work, therefore, not only synthesizes his aesthetic sensibility of the period, but also illustrates his ability to convert gesture and texture into vehicles of poetic meaning, where the visible and the hidden dialogue in a tense and deliberately ambiguous balance.

Antoni Clavé is one of the most relevant figures of Spanish contemporary art. Trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Jordi in Barcelona, Clavé was initially dedicated to advertising graphics, illustration and decorative arts. In 1936 he took an active part in the Civil War, in the Republican ranks, which led him to go into exile in France at the end of the war. That same year, 1939, he exhibits the drawings he made on the battlefields. He settled in Paris, where he met Vuillard, Bonnard and Picasso. He already enjoyed great international prestige at the time when he began to be recognized in Spain, after his exhibition at the Gaspar Gallery in Barcelona in 1956. At the same time, he made illustrations for the work "Gargantua and Pantagruel", which led him to become familiar with medieval iconography. In this same decade of the fifties is when he began his intense work in the world of ballet and theater, achieving great fame in the world of international scenography. In 1952 he made the sets for the film "Hans Christian Andersen", by Charles Vidor, and was nominated for an Oscar award. In 1954, he abandoned set design to devote himself to painting. He received awards at the Hallimark in New York in 1948, at the Venice Biennial in 1954 and at the International Biennial in Tokyo in 1957. In 1984 the Spanish State recognized his artistic value with the exhibition of more than one hundred of his works in the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. That same year he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Clavé's work can be found, among many others, in the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.