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Lot Essay
Embodying Tàpies's signature style of matiere painting from the mid-fifties, En forma d'X extends like an impenetrable wall before the viewer, emphasizing the force of its presence through its tactile material properties. Indulging in the physicality of paint -usually thickened with substances such as powdered marble, bone glue and this particular case, sand - the artist applied the resulting compound like mortar, asserting its plastic substance as the true vehicle of effect and meaning in the resulting physical object. Brittle, scratched and incised with large areas pried off in chunks to reveal the dark ground underneath, the surface of En forma d'X transcends depiction to become an embodiment, a tangible artefact of human endeavours through the vagaries of time.
Tàpies's starkly immediate and highly concrete creations are deeply humanitarian in their confluence of matter and creation, functioning as existential assertions. Propelled by the post-war Zeitgeist and informed by the writings of Sartre, their deeply scored impasto surfaces bear strong relation to Brassaï's wartime photographs of graffiti-scrawled edifices. Indeed, the artist was haunted by the architectural splendours of his hometown in Catalonia, their bullet-ridden and pockmarked surfaces becoming histories of war and silent witnesses to Franco's persecution. Freedom fuels Tàpies's work; his is not an exercise in formal values but rather an attempt to jostle sensibilities to the realities of human existence, particularly with regard to injustices endured by his fellow Catalonians. Indeed, Tàpies's work is Catalan to its core; the high walls, arches and gateways of Barcelona infiltrate the sombre palette and palpable texture of his oeuvre; reaching even further back, his work channels the humble realism of his seventeenth-century forbearers such as Sanchez-Cotán, the mysticism of the mundane, exuding a similar spiritual aura in En forma d'X.
Medieval mysticism (as well as archaic Christianity and Zen) features prominently in Tàpies's thinking process - 'inaccessibility, secrecy, darkness - all the things that lie hidden behind the face of reality' invading in his hermetic enigmas. These austere, earth-hued encrustations often sport scored symbols drawn from spontaneous and intuitive forays into the unconscious, their origins nonetheless rooted in the array of philosophical, religious and psychoanalytical mentors under whom Tàpies has toiled over the years. A particularly recurrent motif, X, acts as a mark of affirmation as well as a sign of negation in the present work, simultaneously yielding and barring explication. Possessing a counterpoint in Jungian psychology in which Tàpies was also vetted, this four pronged symbol -borne out again by the numeral 4 on the lower left, stands for the four functions of consciousness
Tàpies's starkly immediate and highly concrete creations are deeply humanitarian in their confluence of matter and creation, functioning as existential assertions. Propelled by the post-war Zeitgeist and informed by the writings of Sartre, their deeply scored impasto surfaces bear strong relation to Brassaï's wartime photographs of graffiti-scrawled edifices. Indeed, the artist was haunted by the architectural splendours of his hometown in Catalonia, their bullet-ridden and pockmarked surfaces becoming histories of war and silent witnesses to Franco's persecution. Freedom fuels Tàpies's work; his is not an exercise in formal values but rather an attempt to jostle sensibilities to the realities of human existence, particularly with regard to injustices endured by his fellow Catalonians. Indeed, Tàpies's work is Catalan to its core; the high walls, arches and gateways of Barcelona infiltrate the sombre palette and palpable texture of his oeuvre; reaching even further back, his work channels the humble realism of his seventeenth-century forbearers such as Sanchez-Cotán, the mysticism of the mundane, exuding a similar spiritual aura in En forma d'X.
Medieval mysticism (as well as archaic Christianity and Zen) features prominently in Tàpies's thinking process - 'inaccessibility, secrecy, darkness - all the things that lie hidden behind the face of reality' invading in his hermetic enigmas. These austere, earth-hued encrustations often sport scored symbols drawn from spontaneous and intuitive forays into the unconscious, their origins nonetheless rooted in the array of philosophical, religious and psychoanalytical mentors under whom Tàpies has toiled over the years. A particularly recurrent motif, X, acts as a mark of affirmation as well as a sign of negation in the present work, simultaneously yielding and barring explication. Possessing a counterpoint in Jungian psychology in which Tàpies was also vetted, this four pronged symbol -borne out again by the numeral 4 on the lower left, stands for the four functions of consciousness