Jean Marie del Moral
Tàpies and Mallorca
The two studios of Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012) were laboratories where things were born and died, as in a metamorphosis. Every single corner was a mystery, seasoned with symbols and antique objects. The French photographer Jean Marie del Moral, who lived in Mallorca, was able to photograph Tàpies at work. Today he remembers the Catalan artist, one of the greatest of the 20th century, who visited Joan Miró, whom he admired, several times on the island.
text Angie Ramón
photography Jean Marie del Moral
Antoni Tàpies was a giant of 20th century Spanish art, and following on from Joan Miró, whom he visited several times in Mallorca, he followed an extremely materic kind of poetics, hovering between heaven and earth, the void and matter. Ultimately between life and death.
Tàpies was an empathetic man, and at the same time quiet and discreet, with his eyes always wide open. His studios were his world, both the one in Campins, in Montseny, and the one in Barcelona. The first time the photographer Jean Marie del Moral (France, 1952) took a portrait of Antoni Tàpies was in 1989, for the magazine Beaux-Arts.
Del Moral still remembers the artist’s studio as though were a mental space. “I played a lot with the objects I found to bring together the painter’s imagination,” says the photographer, who has collected 420 negatives of Tàpies between 1989 and 1995. “A painter exists for his uniqueness and to set in motion his own form of expression. And that is what occurred with him,’ says Jean Marie.
Antoni Tàpies was born into a cultured family in Barcelona, in a liberal environment. One could say that his artistic vocation came to the fore at a very early age. And yet he studied law at the University of Barcelona, a degree he abandoned shortly before graduating in order to devote himself fully to painting. It was 1946, and his paintings were already manifesting abstract forms, inspired by matter and collage. [...]
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