'The mystical consciousness - almost undefinable - seems fundamental for an artist. It is like a "suffering" of reality, a state of constant hyper-sensitivity to everything that surrounds us, good and bad, light and darkness. It is like a voyage to the center of the universe which furnishes the perspective necessary for placing all things of life in their real dimension'
('I am a Catalan' 1971, repr. in Stiles and Selz Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1996, p. 56).
As with Broken Ground, the surfaces of many of Ties' paintings are like walls in that these strongly material paintings assert themselves as a borderline between two states of understanding both repelling and inviting contemplation. Essentially landscapes made from the psychic interaction between man and material, and, more spiritually, between man as dust and dust as dust, the slight ephemeral, transient but ultimately profoundly meaningful marks that Ties makes in these works, are, for him, scores in the infinite but also material space that is manifested in front of the viewer in the form of the work's more-or-less flat painterly surface. Reflecting the spirit of man energizing and mixing with the matter of the painting, Ties' intention is to penetrate this mystery of life as catalogued on a wall or a door's surface by interacting with this innate nature. In this way, penetrating and making impressions on the surface of a canvas is therefore, for him, analogous to a journey of exploration.