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THINGNESS AND MATERIALITY IN ANTONI TÀPIES MATTER PAINTINGS
Abstract
The things of daily use and matters in contemporary art have been part of the creative process of numerous artists and the artworks themselves. The relationship between objects, matters, and creativity is multidimensional and has given rise to some of the most suggestive and fascinating artistic proposals of the last decades. In this article, we analyze the different dimensions and meanings that the objects and matters have acquired in the undertaking of artists. We will trace two major courses in what concerns the thingness of objects and the materiality of matters in contemporary art: on the one hand, artworks which examine daily objects and substances in a new way and, on the other, those which bring things and matters into a kind of visual and conceptual play as well as experiential event. After a brief review of some historical references, we focus on the case of the use of objects and matters in Antoni Tàpies matter paintings, to explore a rich framework of possible relationships of objects and materials with multiple cultural forms and ways of meaning. The analysis of these connections will have three points of arrival. Firstly, Tàpies, who like many other artists has proposed new approaches towards objects and matters, has shown us his poetics from a new perspective. Secondly, the presence of the object in Tàpies exemplifies the diversity of plays of meaning that reveals the fact of integrating objects of daily life and matters in the artwork through mechanisms such as decontextualization or metonymy, resources widely developed in postmodernity. And finally, the passing of time and the art as an experiential event are Tàpies primary concerns, which are shown both in his intent to feature the deterioration as the essence of material beings through his matter paintings and in his well-known interest in non-Western cultural traditions, long before the massive expansion of the multicultural fascination. By means of objects, matters, and techniques, Tàpies violently embodied the Wabi-sabi to convey art as a momentary earthly event with beginning and end, as a passing-by and, ultimately, as life.
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References12
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