Antoni Tapies: An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to t...

Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life.

Antoni Tapies

meaning-of-life art thinking

The artist has to make the viewer understand that his world is too narrow, he has to open up to new perspectives.

Antoni Tapies

perspective experience artist

If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination. He is compelled to participate in the creative act, which I consider very important.

Antoni Tapies

important creative imagination

The highest wisdom adopts the humblest of bodies.

Antoni Tapies

highest materials body

Reminding people what in reality it is all about, giving them a theme on which to ponder, creating a shock within them, pulling them out of the delusion of non authenticity, enabling them to become aware of their true possibilities.

Antoni Tapies

creating reality people

When I talk of reality, I am always thinking of essentials. Profundity is not located in some remote, inaccessible region. It is rooted in everyday life.

Antoni Tapies

everyday reality thinking

I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy - but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.

Antoni Tapies

study reflection philosophy

Like a researcher in his laboratory, I am the first spectator of the suggestions drawn from the materials. I unleash their expressive possibilities, even if I do not have a very clear idea of what I am going to do. As I go along with my work I formulate my thought, and from this struggle between what I want and the reality of the material - from this tension - is born an equilibrium.

Antoni Tapies

struggle reality ideas

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 Tapies

artist roots white

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.

Antoni Tapies

painting color wrestling

To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere, it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings. A reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once.

Antoni Tapies

metaphysical achieve reality

Which country is real, mine or the teacher's? My wish is that we might progressively lose our confidence in what we think we believe and the things we consider stable and secure, in order to remind ourselves of the infinite number of things still waiting to be discovered.

Antoni Tapies

real teacher country

I feel the desire, or rather the intense need, to do something useful for society, and that is what stimulates me. In every situation I always look for what is positive and beneficial for my fellow citizens.

Antoni Tapies

generosity desire needs

Painting quickly is a calculated act to block out rational thought.

Antoni Tapies

rational painting block

With my work I attempt to help man to overcome his alienation; I do this by surrounding his daily life with objects, which confront him in a tactile way with the final and deepest problems of our existence. I want the means that I employ to create the necessary stimulus to be as direct as possible. Instead of giving a sermon on humility, I often prefer to depict humility itself.

Antoni Tapies

humility men mean

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

Antoni Tapies

mind reality art

It is what makes conscious of the conditions and laws of observing which applied in this manner become a theme on its own. The activity of consciousness depending on the way the work itself proceeds, becomes the subject of my attention this way and it is precisely because of this voyeuristic attitude toward the own observation and experience of the subject that the conscious analytic dimension in the work shows.

Antoni Tapies

law attitude attention

My activities have never had anything to do with the idea of becoming famous or achieving success. I have always been concerned with getting people to listen to me. In everything I do ... my aim is to make people listen. I want to communicate the things that I love and in which I believe, because I think that people can derive a general benefit from them. What I really want is success in a philosophical sense: I want people to grasp something of the ideas and hopes which I express in painting.

Antoni Tapies

philosophical believe thinking

A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance.

Antoni Tapies

shapes space firsts

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 Tapies

religious loss art

An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happens that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discover the truth, because of his own efforts.