A, Desert. B, Solitude

This painting must be fully inscribed in the magical Surrealism that characterised Tapies’ works from this period. Surrealism as a creative procedure -as practised in his previous works, an externalised manifestation of satire and irony towards the facts and products of society he applied to the works of 1948- 1950, keen to make the visual arts allude to the outside world and the intention of reflectlng his subjective thoughts and judgements- has ceased to make sense in this new period. lt is possible that the work, painted in Barcelona, was exhibited at the solo exhibition he held at Galeries Laietanes in autumn 1950 before setting off for Paris a few days later on a grant from the French government. However, because of the ambiguity of the title, he could have painted it whilst already in France, given that the imagery depicted reveals the despair -with a promise at the end- of the personal situation that marked the transition from an unsuccessful stay in Barcelona that he had just come out of and the current location, Paris, and the real initial difficulties of separating from his beloved Teresa.

The work displays, in an undefined scenography where three-dimensionality is clearly evident, an atmosphere conducive to uncertainty in which, nevertheless, a possibility of light can be glimpsed in the evident darkness which, beca use of the difficult definition, we could say refers to a spiritual transcendence, that Tapies’ thought and sensibility were leading the way after the strict surrealist cry of social irony.

Several furniture objects and allusions to openings or possibilities of natural light (large window) with an artificial light source (bulb or lantern) confuse us with regards the possible astral elements (sun and moon) that would suggest we are instead under the rule of a bewitched night of nature. Nothing is defined, everything is lost in a magical atmosphere but with bursts of light, luminous points of an arrow, suggesting there is irradiation with respect to this central nucleus of the work.

Well-defined signs of geometry and colour (red and white), in contrast to all the communicative indecision noted so far, place us at a moment in the author’s oeuvre possibly between the transition and state of mind of a situation from which he wishes to flee (the mystery of a diabolical and infernal trend but which also in this ambiguous work denotes the deep yearning for spirituality with which he feels connected to his beloved – at that moment, more a half-glimpsed Beatrice than the concrete Teresa she would later become), which begins to take shape in the very specific geometric structural and coloured elements, one of the ways to constrain imaginative madness.

lt should be remembered that in 1950, in Paris, Tapies was visited by the constructivist sculptor and architect André Bloc. In a conversation that convinced neither of them, it became very clear that while art must cease to be a personal romance, it must also cease to be a history of the darkness of humanity and become a project and structure that could educate the spirituality of humanity and lead people towards a path which should certainly be established but which was not the one humanity had been based on until then. All this is what we find in this work, in which Tapies, very much in love and sensitive on the personal level but also aware of a forthcoming task that had to be reflected in his art, creates this transitional painting curiously entitled, in the archives of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection A, Desert. B, Solitude, and in the cataloguing of the complete works of Antoni Tapies, Composició. The questions of title display an abstract approach to a very concrete situation, which is evident in this pictorial work, a prelude to implicit philosophies whose definition the artist has yet to initiate.

Arnau Puig