Many walls feature in the photographs I took while in Barcelona, bearing the traces of things past, written on, reworked, diagrammatic, weathered, ageing. Here are some from the day early in October when I was lost between Parc Güell and Parc Guinardó.
In due course I hope to post some taken later that will illustrate the following vague notion.
I have only a slight acquaintance with the work of Antoni Tàpies - still a slight one since the Fundació Antoni Tàpies* was closed for renovations for the duration of my visit, "due to be completed in the spring of 2008 . . . currently difficult to specify a completion date." Here is a painting in the collection of MOMA, New York.
Tàpies' exploration of materials, textures, colour, marks, signs, become "found objects" in and around Barcelona -- once framed. Some of the paintings and mixed media works of Tàpies might be considered not as reproductions or reconstructions of that which is remembered, but as constructions of independent realities exhibiting the principles underlying the chance configurations one finds in the city. (Often these configurations are found at construction sites!)
The photographs included here are from my first day taking pictures and formed just the beginning of the process whereby material textures and colours that I saw around Barcelona converged in time with the memory of (reproductions of) Tàpies works.
* The Fundació, in the Eixample, was formerly Montaner i Simon publishing house, built 1880-1885 by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, restored and refurbished by Roser Amadó and Lluís Domènech Girbau, and is surmounted by Tàpies' Núvol i cadira.
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