Antoni Clavé

ANTONI CLAVÉ (Barcelona, 1913 – Saint-Tropez, France, 2005).
“Superposición,” 1974.
Oil on metal sheet mounted on wood panel.
Signed, titled, and dated on the reverse.
Measurements: 45 x 35 cm; 70 x 54 cm (frame).

The title of this work describes both its construction process and its visual logic. Various metal sheets overlap in oblique strips, disrupting the flatness of the support and transforming the painting into a relief with a striking physical presence. Nails, staples, small discs, and cut-out fragments are incorporated into the composition, where they coexist with incisions, gestural strokes, glazes, and accumulations of material.

Clavé deliberately exploits the expressive and aesthetic qualities of metal: its oxidation, irregularities, and reflections are integrated into a surface dominated by blacks, ochres, grays, and earthy tones. Beneath the abstract appearance, signs, outlines, and fragmentary, almost archaeological forms emerge, suggesting remnants of writing, maps, or vestiges of objects weathered by the passage of time.

Dated 1974, the piece belongs to the artist’s experimental maturity, when he had definitively abandoned his earlier figures of kings and warriors to focus on assemblage, the incorporation of found objects, and the exploration of materials. It also predates by a short time the development of his famous surfaces of folded and layered paper, as well as his “papier froissé,” which have been characteristic of his work since the mid-1970s.

Antoni Clavé was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and set designer associated with the so-called School of Paris. His career evolved from figuration and symbolism toward Informalism and a deeply material abstraction. In 1978, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris dedicated a major retrospective to him, and his work is included, among others, in the collections of the MACBA and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.