Antoni Tápies, that artist not everyone understood

I came to him late and by chance, on one of those museum visits with no sense or direction to them. I hadn't got past the first quarter of my life and part of his work was on show in San Cristóbal de la Laguna. You could tell that exhibition had to be by someone known, someone famous. The Cabildo doesn't go to that much trouble for just anybody the way it did on that occasion. That's how, on that first visit, I got inside the mind of this boy with consumptive hallucinations, this genius with a complex mind who had luckily landed in a rich, liberal family. It's no accident that genius in Spain is oligarchic and very well off. Here more than anywhere else, art doesn't put food on the table.

A brief note on Antoni Tápies's childhood and other unimportant notes

Luckily for all of us, Tápies was born into one of those families, and luckily too he never set foot in any studio or academy where they'd teach him the vices of pictorial narcissism. From the age of 11 he went his own way. It's not surprising at all. When you see his work for the first time, what you're looking at are paintings with an irrational familiarity to them, as if anyone could do that but nobody had actually got down to work to challenge what was established. That's how I felt at that exhibition on 10 May 2012, a date you couldn't knock out of my memory with stones. Because that was Tápies. A stone to the head. An artist who couldn't have cared less about any of us, the same way our beloved mother would ignore us when we wandered around her house as if it were ours. It's precisely that familiarity that has led me here, to this small tribute to an artist not everyone understood (I suspect not even those who praised him).

The artist who didn't study painting but did study Niezstche

If you're looking for a standard biography or you want to know Tápies's work in an analytical sense, you can consult the information at the Fundación Tápies. My ambition isn't that, and I don't think I have enough authority to judge an artist, let alone someone who achieved what very few have. Tápies built his art on three foundations, one was Catalonia, another was matter painting and a third was a set of influences that had nothing to do with painting. Because in that he was self-taught. He did soak himself, though, in Wagner's music and Nietzsche's writing, and in the psychological, dark Dostoyevsky too. Unlike other painters, he had a wide range of cultural interests that went beyond painting. Maybe that was the spark his work needed to be so unique, so far removed from those who came before him.

That “informalism”, as they managed to label his work, basically consisted of doing whatever he felt like, with any material and any method. It was the freedom that made sure this artistic current would never be a current again. What current, what mass can fly off in different directions? It was chaos. And from that chaos, plenty of others pulled out the heart of the matter and made it known to the world through the journal Dau Al Set, which shared its name with the artistic group itself, born in Barcelona in 1948. As André Breton had already done years earlier, defining the current he belonged to through the Surrealist Manifesto, now painting went beyond the barriers of the acceptable to be whatever the painter and the viewer wanted it to be. Tápies lived by the maxim that “a work of art should leave the viewer perplexed, make them meditate on the meaning of life”. I'm not entirely sure he managed to make it about the meaning of life, but we certainly do rack our brains every time we look at one of his artworks. And maybe when that happens, when a viewer looks at one of his paintings with an expression impossible to define, with that “Are you pulling my leg?” grimace, he smiles from the other side and murmurs, “The meaning of life, my dear, the meaning of life”.