Talk:Antoni Tàpies

I placed the unsourced quotes under the Sourced ones, on the same page, Benfo-Dutch

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Antoni Tàpies. --Antiquary 11:06, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

• My kind of painting is filled with several significant layers, such as a volatile structure of language. Reality never truly exposes itself in the image. It only comes into being through associations in the mind of the spectator. That which is supposed to be reality in the art of painting is nothing but a symbol, a mystic symbol for reality.(1987)(translation C. Whorall)

• I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values.(translation C. Whorall)

• More than any other factor the discontent about the quality of the oil painting and my dissatisfaction with the belief in the accepted, classical world played a major part. That is why everything I did seemed to me a form of abuse of the right minded. (1977)(translation C. Whorall)

• I was particularly fascinated by the numerous phenomena, closely related to the deed of creation itself as well as the shapes and images defined by the spectator.(translation C. Whorall)

• There is no art where there is no active observer. As there is no light where there are no eyes.

• More important than subjecting the image to a strict intellectual analysis is enabling the observer to follow the on set, which being more or less clear to him – turns his mind into motion.

Unsourced

Form: Antoni Tàpies at Dutch Wikiquote, (translation C. Whorall)

• These days there is no such thing as art for the sake of pleasure, whatever transcendent or aesthetic meaning one tends to apply to it…. Art is made elsewhere, out there, on another planet (far from reality), which somehow we perceive, art is what is not known. (1952)

• The way art is made these days, confronts us with the way in which Johannes of the Cross (Spanish medieval mystic, fh) used to contemplate. Steep and rough: not offering any additional satisfaction whatsoever. From Nietzsche and onward, art appears to be from beginning to end, the most inhuman adventure in existence. (Tàpies refers here among other things, to the work of the painters Fautrier and Dubuffet, fh).(1952)

• For instance, the symbolism of matter, with its controversies, that is to say, the inner similarity of the deepest being of human and nature. The symbolism of ashes, earth, of mud and clay from which the human being originates and to which he eventually will return; the grains of sand which so obviously indicate the fragility and insignificance of our life and the solidarity emanating from it when one realises that the differences between us (people, fh) are the same as those between one grain of sand and the other; fact is: there is no difference.(1977)

• Did the most modern scientists confirm the ideas of some old philosophers and the intuitive visions of mystics, poets and artists? Without a doubt the need I vaguely felt for using new materials in the art of painting, apart from the influence of some masters, was the result of an effort to call to mind some problems raised by matter, substance and nature.(1977)

• How many possibilities may arise from the image of the ‘wall’ and everything diverted from it. Separation, isolation, wailing walls, prison walls. Witnesses of the passing of time : smooth, calm, white surfaces, tortured, old, perished surfaces; signs of human intervention, traces of objects of the force of nature; impressions of battle, of exertion, of destruction, of catastrophes or of renovation, creating and balance; what is left of love, grief, aversion, chaos, romantic enchantment of silted ruins by organic matter; shapes from which one can read the rhythm of nature and the spontaneous mobility of matter. (1980, about his early wall-like paintings, fh)

• (my paintings) for the first time in history have become walls. (about his former Arte-Povare–art, fh)

Further comment

The above quotes are removed because Wikimedia projects are not considered citable sources. These quotes could be restored if an original, and source are known. -- Mdd (talk) 19:40, 3 June 2014 (UTC)