Introduzione (pag.7) E non pi una tecnica rigorosa intesa come sinonimo di abilit e di perizia esecutiva, ma al contrario un saggio opportunismo ben disposto a trarre partito dal caso dagli incontri fortuiti, dai vari incidenti imprevedibili che sempre sorgono negli incontri e scontri tra lattivit umana e le resistenze dellambiente (R.Barilli).Avvertenza : larte novit per essenza. Ce un solo regime salutare per la creazione artistica : quello della rivoluzione permanente . (17)Ma la caratteristica propria dun arte dinvenzione di non somigliare allarte dominante (18)A su regreso de su estancia en Pars en 1951, Tpies emprende un nuevorumbo artstico, que se traduce en la realizacin de muros sobre lienzo, uno de loselementos ms carctersticos de su obra. Los muros y tapias construidos sobre ellienzo ofrecen superficies opacas manchadas con signos a modo de lenguajepopular, una especie de graffiti que se opone al lenguaje privado de la abstraccin,tan de moda en ese momento. De esta manera el muro sirve de tablero paracomunicar las inquietudes de la sociedad. El muro se convierte en la metfora deun foro en el que se inscriben graffiti que se revelan contra la situacin opresiva delmomento. Aprobecha la expresividad que puede tener la escritura en el muro, paraprovocar un impacto en el espectador.Tpies garnered notoriety in the Fifties with his matter paintings. Large and emphatically physical canvases, they are layered with paint, sand, and marble dust and then incised, scraped, and pierced. Tpies scratches into these surfaces forms that recall hieroglyphics, calligraphy, and graffiti. These works can border on relief sculpture, and their colors are dry and grittyblacks, browns, grays, and rusts predominate. The matter paintings share affinities with other art of the time, particularly Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. But the strongest influence on Tpies may have been the art brut of Jean Dubuffet. Tpies shares the Frenchmans fascination with the untutored vitality of graffiti, as well as with the weathered surfaces of the city; Tpies has referred to his paintings as walls. But he has neither Dubuffets sensitivity for surface nor his sense of humor. A Dubuffet-ish work like Nude (1966)a mottled blot of a woman riddled with marks, letters, and smudgeshas a lot going on in it, but it doesnt add up to much. Tpiess scribbles seem arbitrarytheres no pictorial reasoning to them. Dubuffet defined the ground of his paintings with a crotchety line and an all-over surface texture. In comparison, Tpies merely scrawls on his canvases with the hope that something worthwhile will emerge.

Despite their gestural brutality and buckled surfaces, however, the matter paintings are tepid; their ferocity is secondhand. Attempting to evoke the rawness of graffiti found on city walls, Tpies copies the wall instead of embodying the unhewn energy that attracted him to it in the first place. Theres no intrinsic life to his work; Tpies is so in thrall to the idea of art that he cannot get beyond literal transcription. When he wants us to feel the weight of history, for instance, he scratches a triangle and some hasty glyphs into an encrusted canvas, titles it Pyramid, and thus, presumably, summons us before the glories of ancient Egypt. Tpies trades in romantic banalities. In a sense, hes too polite for his own good, and Dubuffet, at his best, was scarcely that.

The chief liability of Tpiess work relates to the idea of the wall in another way. For Tpies, the flat surface of the canvas is just that: flat. He is too much of a materialist to believe in painting as a vehicle for metaphor achieved through illusion. Tpies never sees into his canvases and there is little space or light to speak of in his work. Consequently, Tpies abjures painting for its (to borrow that burnished buzzword of the times) simulacrum. Of course, this is not a characteristic unique to Tpies. Artists such as Robert Ryman and Cy Twombly practice what could best be termed ersatz paintingthey offer the look of painting, if not its actuality. And so it is with Tpies. For whatever else it may be, his workwith its scale, physicality, and expressionist agitationlooks like it should be art. This may be the reason why otherwise sensible people, like catalogue essayist Dore Ashton, admire his work: it has the appearance of significance.

The surfaces of Tpiess canvases, then, serve solely as a base on which to pile detritus. And pile it on he does. By the late Sixties and early Seventies, Tpies began affixing buckets, bags of hay, rope, belt buckles, hooks, and a variety of other objects to his paintings. One fancies that this was done in the hope of transcending (as the artist put it) the excesses of abstract art, as if pasting on tangible objects did not risk its own variety of overkill. Yet, Tpies is also something of a mystic and has stated that his aim is to induce a meditative state in the viewer. In other words, hes a materialist, but he wants his spirituality (or anti-tangibility) too. But theres no magic to Tpiess work; his objects sit dumbly on the surface of the canvas. His painting is slapdash stuff and, boy, is it serious. (At least Robert Rauschenberg, whatever his merits as an artist, had fun putting his assemblages together.) Yet, its hard to tell what Tpies is so serious about.

Or maybe its too easy. Painting with an Ironing Board (1970) combines an ironing board, a piece of cloth, and a small mirror on a ground splattered with paint and sand. Tpies arranges these items in a vaguely iconic manner, but theres no sense of transformation to it. He doesntor cantlet his objects carry their own metaphorical weight. Tpies has no faith in their allusive capabilities, and how compelling is a mystic who doesnt have faith in something larger than himself? One suspects that these works are intended to connect by force of will, what Tpies calls the artists magic prestige. But will alone never put rubbish over on its own terms and Tpies attempts at transcendence are woefully earthbound.

If Tpiess early work was ahead of its time, then his paintings of the Eighties and Nineties poke along behind it. They are reminiscent, in no small way, of Mirs misguided attempts at outdoing the Abstract Expressionists. In Tpiess case, its depressing seeing him trying to catch up with, of all people, Julian Schnabel. (Talk about cultural de-evolution.) Immense in scalewoe to the museum having to store these mammoths!the recent work is reliably bombastic but it does ease up a bit; it provides more to look at if only because there isnt as much stuff in the way. Here Tpiess use of materials becomes less monotonous as does the oppressive physicality of the paintings. (The vacuum-like sweep of the SoHo Guggenheims galleries helps the work along as well.) The paintings are still hodgepodges of stains, scribbles, objects, and graffiti, but better sloppy vulgarity than portentous gravitas, if not by much.

The finest pieces on view in Tpies predate the matter paintings. Silver Paper Collage and Figure of Newsprint and Threads, both from 1946, are somewhat pedestrian neo-Surrealist collages that nevertheless engage the viewer by inviting him to look closely. Silver Paper Collage, in particular, with its tracery of threads, reveals Tpiess debt to Mir in a way that is affecting. Even so, its memory all but pales in the face of what I consider the quintessential Tpies painting. Infinity (1988) is a gray and grainy surface with the word INFINIT incised in layers along all four edges of the painting, as if simplistic scrawls could conjure up an endless horizon of spiritual inquiry. Here, Tpies relies on chutzpah and chutzpah alone, and it isnt enough. Hes playing the artist as seer, presenting us with a philosophers stone predigested for easy consumption and, much to his unimagined chagrin, easy to disregard. Tpiess work may not be conceptual art as we have come to know it, but its limitations are related and no amount of magic prestige will save it from being overheated and facile. If, indeed, Picasso, Mir, and Tpies form the holy trinity of Spanish modernism, then Tpies reveals that some artists are holier than others.

Nellopera Roda-Mandala del 1980, Tpies riprende graficamente il pensiero di Carl Jung sullenergia circolare che governa il mandala (dal sanscrito, cerchio) ovvero . Tpies con un tratto vorticoso esprime questa forza primigenia, ultraterrena che sembra inghiottire il caos della vita quotidiana, fatto di insignificanza e concretezza, portando a chi lo traccia di guarire da questa monotonia e conquistare la via (Tao) per la propria spiritualit.

In generale, si tratta di un tipo di pittura dal procedimento pi lento rispetto ad altri indirizzi dell'Informale. L'artista, infatti, calcola attentamente l'equilibrio compositivo del quadro, cerca di valorizzarne al massimo le caratteristiche della superficie. Il suo interesse non rivolto tanto alla forma rappresentata o al gioco delle tinte. Si focalizza piuttosto sulla trama e il colore della materia, cercando nel contempo di salvaguardare l'armonia complessiva dell'immagine.Attraverso questo procedimento l'artista sonda le potenzialit energetiche ed evocative della materia nuda e cruda, del tutto autonoma, svincolata da un'immagine. Le concrezioni di materia pittorica, che sembrano sospese nel vuoto, diventano quindi metafora di una ricerca esistenziale. Una ricerca volta a scoprire qualcosa di autenticamente genuino, da poter opporre alla desolante mancanza di certezze.