BarcelonaIn an exposition of the Year of Tapis, his son Antony concluded his parliament by reading a poem he had written when his father died. Sentiment aside, it was an important gesture, if we consider that Antoni Tápies Barba’s poetry (Barcelona, 1956) was at times a throwback to his career as an art gallery owner and his work promoting his father’s work and legacy. “I have devoted myself more to the creativity of artists than to my own creativity,” says Antoni Tapis Barba on the occasion of the publication of an anthology of his poetic works entitledUnmanned light. Anthology (1973-2002)edited by the poet and literary critic Jordi Lavina and published by the page editors: “I will always be grateful to Jordi Lavina for the support he gave me, because I really needed it. I have written eight books, and I am happy,” says Tapis Barba, considered one of the most important Catalan poets of the 1970s. “Very much because my books are once again in libraries, even if only partially.”
Antoni Tàpies Barba trained as a doctor and, at the same time, catered to his need to express himself. He holds degrees in medicine and surgery and specializes in internal medicine. He worked until 1988, when he founded a publishing house for graphic works, Edicions T, and in 1994 he opened the Toni Tàpies gallery. The first book, Sebok (1973), published when he was only twenty years old. This was the fourth book in Moll’s symbolic books. “I started composing some visual poems, very influenced by Joan Brosa, whom I saw a lot at the time, and then I composed Sebok“Where there are lines, that is, there are words but there is an important visual component,” explains the author. It was published later U dances (1975), days of water (1980), The sound of the wind (1988), Night sieve (1990) ed The question of the stars (1992).
Epidemic, trigger
Among Tapis Barba’s penultimate books, Writer (1999), and the last, Kingmaker (2022), 23 years have passed. “In all these years I had written half a book and it had never been published. When the pandemic hit, and we were locked up at home in quarantine, I thought I had to do something, because I didn’t know how I was going to deal with being cooped up for several weeks, and one of the things I… What I had to do was take the book he started again and correct it from top to bottom and when I did that, the desire to write came back to me and I finished it. I was able to write during all those days in a very regular and much more intense way,” the author explains.
From the poetry of Tapis Barba, Lavina emphasizes the root, which has “in essence a symbolic root”, with recurring motifs taken from nature such as trees and animals such as the falcon and wolves. With each of them, Tapis Barba has shaped a very personal world that has given him different insights over the years. Lavina points out that the sustained bass of Water days It is “constant thinking in time.” a The question of the stars Tàpies Barba has investigated the classical form of the sonnet, viz Writer It consists of short prose poems of an aphoristic nature. “Tabies Barba’s poetry often aims to reveal what remains hidden, something that is not clear to the audience Physical sensesWhat will Yui say? As if he wanted to touch just the beauty that hides the stone,” says Lavina. “For me, poetry is a way of seeing the world, an almost metaphysical way of perceiving the world, in the sense that there is something for me that goes beyond the physical world,” says Tapis Barba. To me, poetry is like a great tree, a wonderful tree, but we must not only notice its leaves and branches, which are so beautiful, and the wonderful trunk, but there are also some roots of this tree that go deep into its depths, the darkness that is as necessary or more necessary than the branch. So, poetry for me has these two sides, a brighter side, a more natural side, and this deep side, rooted in darkness. There is thinking, there is a kind of mysticism,” the author concludes.
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