(Barcelona 1923–2012)
Cercle au graffiti blancs, 1986, signed Tàpies, paint and graffiti on glazed lava stone, diameter 100 cm

Photo Certificate:
Antoni Tàpies Foundation, archive no. T-4897, Barcelona, 17/5/2000

Provenance:
Galerie Lelong, Paris (with photo certificate)
Galleria Cleto Polcina Arte Moderna, Rome
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Rome, Antoni Tàpies osservatore partecipante, Cleto Polcina Arte Moderna, 1988, cat. p. n. n. ill
Genoa, Periplo del Mediterraneo, Maestri e Nuove espressioni tra Genova e Istanbul, Museo Accademia Linguistica di Belle Arti, 2004, cat. curated by Maurizio Calvesi e Marisa Vescovo, p. 57 with ill.

(...) So the external support, the wall, belongs to everyone, but only the individual and incisive action of the artist is able to infringe the hard and opaque resistance of its surface.
Perhaps the wall belongs to everyone because everyone is able to look at it, it belongs to the collective eye. But the dream of art possesses the strength to make itself visible, to appear to those who are not artists, but only as a representation. Tàpies brings his dream of art into contact with the body; from his multi-sensory totality, he lowers the flight of images to the level of the collective gaze, via a support that is comprehensible by everyone: the wall. Here, time and space materialise their intersections, defining their meeting points in the forms most in keeping with the nature of the support. The marks are almost always graffiti, clots of matter, small lacerations and wounds that grow together within the substance of the wall. Tàpies’s wall is crossed by writing that is both durable and also precarious, composed of mute signs and casts of objects, as if they had fallen into a fresh substance that then solidified around them, without allowing them to escape. Tàpies’s low dream is entirely immersed in the everyday, citing the images of uncountable small objects, small accidents of shape that meet the wall, pictures that grow in the substance, arousing a memory that is, of necessity, collective.
Achille Bonito Oliva, 1988

„I am unable to understand the creative act, unless I make it dependent on a personal approach“
Antoni Tàpies