Antoni Tàpies: ‘Political Autobiography’

Antoni Tàpies, ‘Porta Metal-lica i Violi’ (‘Metal Shutter with Violin’) (1956-74), mixed media, 200 x 150 x 13cm

In the astonishing, beautiful gallery spaces of the Fundació in Barcelona that bears his name, ‘Antoni Tàpies: Political Autobiography’ gathers together a large selection of the artist’s paintings, assemblages and prints, alongside photographic documentation, and monitors showing looped black-and-white footage of public protests; all in order to pose some interesting questions. How, the show appears to ask, does an art ostensibly without narrative content address the atrocities perpetrated during the last, desperate phase of the Franco regime? What becomes of Tàpies’ ‘poetics of the street’ (the rags, debris, carpenter’s offcuts, trowelled-on mortar) when the street has a barricade thrown across it?

Reading the titles, and the commentaries appended to works such as ‘A la memória de Salvador Puig Antich’ (‘In memory of Salvador Puig Antich’) of 1974, left Instantloveland in no doubt as to the artist’s passionate commitment; but the works themselves are problematic. What is gained, and what is lost, when abstraction gets boiled down to matter and signs? Are we forced to choose between didacticism and depth? As the show’s catalogue points out (with admirable understatement), linking an abstract painting to a real historical event via its title ‘does not allow us to say that these are historical paintings in the strictest sense of the term.’

Instantloveland was left to wonder: for all their vaunted involvement with the struggle, aren’t these works all just a little bit tasteful? Is ‘Porta Metal-lica i violi’ (‘Metal Shutter with Violin’) of 1956-74 really ‘political autobiography’? Or was Tàpies just fiddling while Barcelona burned?

‘Antoni Tàpies: Political Autobiography’ is at Fundació Antoni Tàpies until February 24th 2019.