Mise en page 1 - Antoni Taulé

16 Pages·2012·1.88 MB·English

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Besharat Gallery
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163-175 Peters St.SW,
Atlanta, GA 30313
www.besharatgallery.com
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Phone: [phone]
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Fax: [phone]
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Besharat Gallery
Antoni Taulé
Born in Sabadell, Antoni Taulé is a painter, photographer and It has been several years since Taulé visited
Catalonia, Spain, in 1945. set-designer born in 1945, in the textile city the United States. He first exhibited his work at
of Sabadell, Catalonia, which became the most the Hastings Gallery in New York and at The Wall
important wool city in Spain in the mid 19th Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, and in Santa Fe,
century. The birthplace of the painter starts NM, in 1983. Also in 1984, the artist created
to decline from the decade of the 1970’s, the sets for the play Childhood, from Nathalie
coinciding with the waning of the Taulé’s Sarraute, translated by Barbara Wright, in which
family industry. After establishing links with Glenn Close was the starring actress and that was
the textile manufacturing cities in China represented in the Samuel Beckett Theater in NY.
and Japan, the family business would end up Taulé was also commissioned by the dancer and
closing its doors in the middle of the last century. choreographer Rudolf Noureev to take the ballet
But the movement of trunks and suitcases adaptation of Henry James’s novel Washington
from the Far East would captivate Antoni Taulé Squareto the Paris Opera and to the Metropolitan
forever with a mysterious, delicate, distant and Opera in NY, and later that year he would design
unknowable world, in a fabulous and legendary the sets for Nathalie’s Sarraute For No Good Reason,
era. In this exhibition, Porte rougeis one of the translated by Kaye Mortley, which was
paintings in which one can appreciate Taulé’s represented at the Harold Clurman Theatre in
interest for the Far East, but not the only one. NY, before going on a long theater tourthrough
Paris, Barcelona, Nice, London and Montpellier.
The stories told by the representative of the
family’s firm in the Far East contributed to Taulé did not return to the US until 1998,
exhilarate Taulé’s fascination, which is reflected when he exhibited at the Kiron Gallery
in some of his works. This legendary substrate in Dallas-Fortworth, TX.
operates in his memory as an invisible spring:
Fourteen years later, after forging a solid career
his works bind or dissociate seemingly opposed
in Asia and Europe, Antoni Taulé returns to
worlds under a secret doorway, which is
the United States. Without a doubt the selection
sometimes seemingly open. The closest appears
of the paintings presented in the Besharat Gallery
to us as the farthest. Strange illusion:
in Atlanta is so far the best representation
The paintings in this exhibition take us into
of the work of an artist with a voice of his own,
the secrecy of a paradoxical language which
free and recognizable; the happy culmination
is inhabited by Goya, Velazquez, Lucien Freud,
of a personal adventure which started after
De Chirico, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
overcoming much difficulty in 1965.
in some areas and spaces subject to Taulé’s light.
Maps and cartographies that are mundane or Currently Taulé paints in his studios in
cosmic, that have been experienced or thought, Switzerland, Paris and in the one that he built
all under the relief of a light which silhouettes with his own hands in 1978, in the family house
shadows, spaces, obsessions. ‘Locus Solus’, located on the small island of
Formentera, off the coast of the Mediterranean
For instance, in the painting La Mer mêlée au soleil,
Sea. Taulé seems to have achieved, both
Taulé places the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky inside
personally and artistically, what Stefan Zweig
one of these new and aseptic architectural
wrote in the essay The Monotonizationof the
spaces that China creates at a breakneck speed.
World, when this writer of great sensitivity
Mayakovsky, who, shortly before his tragic death
perceived the social changes and the uniformity
in 1937, wrote: ‘Art is not a mirror to reflect the world,
that was already being started at the interwar
but a hammer with which to shape it’.
period and sensed the sterilization of all the
Taulé’s painting of St. Bartholomew, one cultural events that the writer saw in his
of the Twelve Apostles, possibly one of the most numerous travels. Zweig, an eternal pessimist,
represented in Art History over the past five only saw one way: ‘The flight to oneself’.
centuries, and almost always with a knife in The greatest achievement of the individual
his hand, which would be the instrument with is their ‘inner freedom’(...) Freedom from
which he was skinned alive by order of the King opinions, freedom from things, freedom
of Armenia, presents one of the apostles of Jesus for oneself. That is our task, to be increasingly
in front of a futuristic building, ever so common free while others get more voluntary bondage’.
in China nowadays.
Pedro Martin
Taulé’s treatment of large spaces evidence’s
his studies as an architect at the University
of Barcelona (Catalonia), as well as his readings
of Herman Melville, Jack London and James
O. Curwood, among others. But this dialogue
between literature and art has also been
reciprocal. Julio Cortázar, inspired by
the paintings of Taulé, titled one of his stories
Fin de etape (End stage), included in the book
of short stories Deshoras(Unreasonable Hours).
Zaida Kersten, 2012
1. 2.
1.
Le Carlin
2011,
63¾x51¼(162 x130)
Oil on canvas
Private collection, USA
Ref. 1419
2.
Façade
2011
32 x25½(81x65 cm)(cid:0)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 1428
3.
Mort à Venise
2011
32 x25½(81x65)(cid:0)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 1434
4.
L’Énigme verticale
2011
51¼x38¼(130 x97)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 1414
3.
4.
6. 7.
5. 6.
La Vue Opinion
2011 2008
63¾ x51¼(162 x130) 39¼ x32 (100 x81)
Oil on canvas Oil on canvas
Ref. 1422 Ref. 1361
7.
Brûlé de soleil
2008
39¼ x32 (100 x81)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 1360
5.
8.
8. 9. 10.
Application A La Quinta del sordo Arc-en-ciel des passions
2002 2008 2010
38¼x51¼(cid:0)(97 x130) 51¼x38¼(cid:0)(130 x97) 78¾ x118 (200 x300)
Oil on canvas Oil on canvas Oil on canvas
Ref. 0318 Ref. 1353 Ref. 1409
11.
La Mer mêlée au soleil
2009
78¾ x118 (200 x300)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 1349
12.
Étranglement de la nostalgie
2007
38¼x51¼ (97 x130)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 1355
9.
10.
11.
12.
13. 14.
13. 14. 16.
La Cour carrée Nautilus 5 Épouser les formes du monde
2011 2004 2007
43¼ x70 (110 x178) 43¼ x70 (110 x178) 78¾ x118 (200 x300)
Oil on canvas Oil on canvas Oil on canvas
Ref. 1418 Ref. 0381 Ref. 0427
15.
Nautilus 8
2004
43¼ x70 (110 x178)
Oil on canvas
Ref. 0384
15.
16.