Antoni Tàpies - Painting Quotes

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In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

Antoni Tàpies
Starting with approaching the spot where the painting is to be done, meanwhile realising the emptiness of the mind, up to the method of 'the flying white', of the rule of the singular stroke of the brush.... there is a proper tradition in which the artist is fully aware of the fact that only the pure and empty spontaneity enables him to embrace without hesitating all apparitions and to truly penetrate into the roots of things.

Antoni Tàpies
Was it the culmination of a process of fatigue brought about by the proliferation of an easy tachism in the world? A reaction to escape anarchic informalism? An attempt to flee abstract excess and the urge for something more concrete? Did I see the possibility to reach even more primordial levels, the most extremely pure elements, the most essential elements of painting that the masters from the preceding generation had stimulated me to seek?

Antoni Tàpies
Metaphors of space have always been introduced into painting, the play of fullness and emptiness, volumes, surfaces, light and shade... And, in recent painting, in particular, the notion of 'emptiness' has assumed great significance... This interest in emptiness, in nothingness, is found in many disciplines, in particular in an important sector of modern philosophy. We know, for example, that the philosophers such as Heidegger or Sartre have, at a given moment, made nothingness the center of their thought...

Antoni Tàpies
Despite my fervour for many Surrealist painters, I was soon wary of the preeminence of those 'literary anecdotes' that made many works appear as 'genre clichés', not unlike nineteenth-century pastiches. They often ignored the visual possibilities of the painting medium.

Antoni Tàpies