“At heart, my painting is a meditation on human nature. On what it is and why it is. It is an attempt to explain man to himself, to help him see the richness of his own resources and it must also be a reflection of our common destiny, on death itself.”
— Antoni Tàpies
En Forma de Cama, executed in 1968, is part of the oeuvre of Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, and as suggested by the title, dedicated to the human body. At the time, Spain - and more so Catalonia - was still under the oppressive rule of Franco’s regime characterised by cultural oppression and political tensions. The artist’s political resistance is reflected in his art, which is a result of his decision to remain in Spain during this time period. While death and pain are recurring themes in his work due to his interest in Buddhism, his paintings of arms and legs can be understood as an ex-voto. Tàpies believed that art played its most important social role in history during the medieval times, which spiked his interest in religious medieval Catalan painting. The artist’s works possess an element of mysticism and sacrality, where he combines the Buddhist though that there is a ‘whole universe in a grain of sand’ with the idea that his depictions of arms and legs have a magical and direct physical effect on his viewers.i In addition to this, Tàpies’ surname, meaning ‘walls’ in Catalan, made the artist believe that it was his destiny to study every possible aspect of a wall.ii Thus, texture, symbols and scribbles have a reoccurring presence in his work.
As such En Forma de Cama offers insight into his technique and understanding of painting. Forcing himself to work quickly, the artist typically sprinkled marble dust on fast-drying varnish to create a textured canvas. He would then go on to leave spontaneous scrawling marks or writings on the surface to ‘keep reason in its place so that the unconscious can run free’.iii This is visible in the scratches on the leg that can resemble hairs and also in the vertical line in the centre of the canvas that violently divides the leg, suggesting a vulnerable and broken state. Tàpies not only reflected his intellectual aspirations in materiality to escape the academic idea of painting but also in his muted colour scheme that ‘would match the philosophical and interior world’.
The topic of death and vulnerability combined with his use of materials positioned Tàpies as an important member of the Art Informel movement. His creative processes led him to explore the boundaries between painting and sculpture which expressed his strong resistance to Franco’s dictatorship. Inspired by the use of materials and rejection of academic artistic conventions, Tàpies’ work later became an inspiration for the Arte Povera movement.
