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15/11/2006

Antoni Tapies

Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid

Nausea and the hand
Guillermo Solana

A certain day, a certain man (a certain Antoine Roquentin) believes that something strange is happening to him. It is Saturday and the children, by the sea shore, are playing ducks and drakes, throwing flat stones and making them bounce on the water’s surface. The man is trying to imitate them and he picks up a stone from the ground, but then stops himself, without knowing why, and lets the stone fall: “The stone was flat and dry, especially on one side, damp and muddy on the other. I held it by the edges with my fingers wide apart so as not to get them dirty."

From that moment on, Roquetin is to describe with painstaking details in his personal diary the symptoms of a delirium that is shown above all in certain perturbing tactile sensations. His first obsession consists in believing that the objects touch him: “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them; put them back in place, you live among them. They are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts. Now I see: I recall better what I felt the other day at the seashore when I held the pebble. It was a sort of sweetish sickness. How unpleasant it was! It came from the stone, I’m sure of it, it passed from the stone to my hand. Yes that’s it, that’s just it—a sort of nausea in the hands."

The most common, every day things take on for poor Roquentin an informal character and a sort of viscosity. “In my hands, for example, there is a newness, a certain way of picking up my pipe or my fork. Or maybe it’s the fork that now has a certain way of being picked up, I don’t know. Just now, when I was about to enter my room, I stopped short, because I felt in my hand a cold object that held my attention with a sort of personality. I opened my hand, I looked: I was simply holding the latch on the door." Afterwards Roquentin looks at his own hands with an infinite strangeness and feels them as if they were two small disturbing animals, like strange crabs with a white abdomen that nervously shake their claws in the air.

Roquentin’s perplexities make up the argument of this metaphysical treaty turned into a novel entitled Nausea written by Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre considers our hands to be a privileged organ that takes charge of the absurd of our existence, in order to perceive the game of hide and seek between the “in itself" and the “for itself", the disagreement between factitiousness and significance. The first experience of anguish as a feeling that detects that Nothing is accommodated not in the eye, nor in the mouth, but rather in the hand. And what about Ta'pies? Ta'pies already sensed a long time ago the so called “nausea of the hands" that Sartre talked about in relation with Roquentin, and ever since he has continually tried to capture it in his work.

The peculiar thing about the hand is that it is equally capable of doing and feeling, of acting and perceiving. In it the active and the passive, the action and the feeling are merged together. And this makes the hand a scene for a strange exchange of papers between things and between conscience, between the res extensa and the res cogitans . Our skin tends to interpret the surface of any object as if it were another skin. The sense of touch is always exposed to the illusion of understanding motionlessness as something alive, the inanimate as animate, violating the border between thought and object. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre develops this inversion in relation with the phenomenology of viscous things. Viscous things are passive and docile to our touch, but in the exact moment that one believes to possess it, the roles are turned for it is he who possesses us:and its sticky softness is transformed into a suction pad.

Between the haptic and the optical, there is a conventional hierarchy, according to which the sense of touch appears to be destined to be subordinated to sight, which would be the most noble of senses. After all, the sense of touch is only capable of producing a fragmentary perception and the tactile space lacks a unique, stable system of reference, something similar to the perspective or the proportions in the visual domain. But at the same time, the sense of touch allows us a more intimate encounter with things. Our eyes know a lot of things, an infinity of details, but our hand knows something that is fundamental. The hand is the other side of what is visible. The eye dominates the visible surface of things. But the hand knows the hidden side to things. The hand is like a long probe which descends into darkness.

When Ta'pies reflects an arm, a leg, an ear, each of these fragments of anatomy are at first difficult to recognise since they are presented too close to us, in a close-up. This is the case of “Lligat", showing a body exposed with its hands tied together evoking Jesus being beaten and wearing a crown of thorns or the Iraqi prisoners being tortured and mocked in Abu Ghraib. The torso and arms are so close that they appear to be completely identified with the pictorial surface in relief. Each of the marks or scratches in the pictorial material is an episode of the supplicium , the ritual torment to which the victim is submitted. These extremely disturbing tactile marks interrupt the serene flow of the visual element and intensify the expressive charge of the image in an extraordinary way.

The tactile perception in close-up exaggerates things considerably and converts them into monuments in themselves. Each object or each fragment of anatomy is erected as an enigma or an emblem of our mortality (like those hieroglyphs from the end of the Baroque age). This sense is represented in the enigma of the hand with a hole bored through it (“Ma foradada") three times, with three holes like a ritual scar signed by a worm (this is what the word cuc, written below, means), a cross, a few letters and the number three. Each fragment of the body is turned into a sign, and reciprocally, the writing recovers its corporal root. Numbers, letters, crosses, in spite of their abstract shaping, come from the hands, that is to say, they come from the body and go towards the body. They are corporal imprints, marks on a material support: stains, grooves, shreds.

The tactile dominance in Ta'pies’s painting responds (from the very beginnings of the artist’s career) to a regressive drive, a descent towards the depths of the past, of conscience, of material. Regression is a defensive process by means of which the patient returns to serve the ego, which can form part of the process of self therapy. All healing, all spiritual regeneration entails the necessity of a regressive trip, a revival of previous times, where the secret origin of the illness can be found.

This exploration illuminates all the aspects of Ta'pies’s work. His drawing, for example, returns to its initial state, towards doodling or street graffiti, to that initial moment in which drawing and writing were the same thing. Drawing returns to its elementary root, to the act of tracing lines with a spade in the ground or using a spray on the wall. In the painting, conceived like a wall, the essential signs appear; the cross and the T, T for Ta'pies and Teresa. In “Trapezi negre", a monumental sign that merges the A and the T appear like a prophecy before the trapeze that acts like a door to darkness, like the threshold of the night.

The regressive process culminates with the mortification of live colours, brownish -grey, black, colours of ashes and earth colours. It culminates in the small burial mounds of “Relleus circulars". In the terrestrial bed (“Terra i palla") with the crosses painted in black. In “Mate'ria grisa", it is the accumulation of material that has something to do with excrementitious and which expresses the character of Sartre’s viscosity; not only can it be touched but it actively touches us. There it is formless, waiting for us, it designates what according to Bataille “gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm." Mixed with our repugnance this causes an intense, proscribed attraction towards what is formless to rise to the surface. I do not dare touch that grey material for fear that it may gobble me up like a whirlpool, but I remain still staring at it in fascination and I recite in a low voice, almost like a prayer, the verses of Gottfried Benn: “O dass wir unsere Ururahnen waren/ Ein Klumpchen Schleim in einen warmen Moor". Oh, if we were our great great grandparents, a fistful of mud in a warm swamp…

Translated by L. Kerslake

Galeria Soledad Lorenzo
C/ Orfila, 5 28010 Madrid

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