Antoni Taulé

The Works

Nautilus 9
2004
110 x 179 cm
Oil on canvas

This work belongs to the Nautilus series, the name of Captain Nemo’s underwater ship, the outlaw and loner, referencing the protagonist of Jules Verne’s classic work, Twenty-One Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In one scene, Nemo, Latin for “Nobody,” shows two intruders the interior of the ship and the large room containing the greatest works of art in the history of humanity.
Nautilus 9, as Taulé has done in many of his works, presents a layout divided into a large, loosely defined interior space and an open exterior space through which an intense, blinding light enters, obscuring the view; only the dry, stony relief of a fragment of coastline bathed by a calm sea. It’s worth noting here that Taulé is in love with the island of Formentera, where he spends long periods of time.
The interior is dark. The light from outside doesn’t fully penetrate. Hanging on the walls of the room is a seemingly empty display case, as if waiting for some object, and a well-known Goya painting, the 1815 Self-portrait from the end of his life, already in seclusion. It’s another reference to the “painting within a painting,” perhaps like a mirror.
Taulé uses the classic technique of oil painting on canvas on large canvases where the solitude of the exteriors is multiplied by that of the uninhabited interiors, where an enigmatic figure appears at times frozen in time.

A Story
1978
60 x 90 cm
Photography

Taulé is a painter, but from the very beginning, photographs were a medium, a tool in the process prior to painting. But from a certain point on, the medium became confused with the end. Photographs are as enigmatic as paintings. The spaces had to be empty, and it was necessary, above all, to choose the time and day: it was very important to know how to capture the instant when the sun rose and the light penetrated horizontally into the interior.
Unlike painting, photography designates the waiting for the moment, and then the moment itself, an instant; painting, on the other hand, extends in duration and is progressively built, in a succession of brushstrokes and layers that transform the subject and imbue it with an almost obsessive insistence. Since the 1970s, in photographs such as Bonnet rouge (Barretina, 1977) and Miroir (Mirror, 1985), Taulé’s camera captures the unsettling strangeness of the place, arranging deeply ambivalent and enigmatic elements, people, or objects, which later metamorphose into the paintings.
This photographic series includes the work A Story, which is part of the Foundation’s collection following the retrospective exhibition Taulé presented in 2017. While in photography, light, the main protagonist, clearly delineates the contours of the place and the objects, in the paintings they become symbolic and imaginary.
Anecdotally, it can be added that the person appearing pensive in the photograph is a close friend of Taulé, the artist, actor, and film director Michel Pommereulle, who passed away in 2003 and whose work the Foundation has in its collection.

The artist

(Sabadell, Catalonia, 1945)

Taulé’s painting is based on his attraction to large, empty spaces. In it, one finds the dialectic of emptiness: a dialogue between the large interior spaces and light (or backlighting, as in the series of caves he painted in Formentera during the 1980s, but also in works from other periods). A dialectic, by extension, between interior and exterior space, which penetrates the painting through the almost cinematic projection of light. A light that unveils the dark interior and reveals its disturbing and enigmatic nature. And which at the same time recalls the exterior landscape, indefinite, immeasurable. The interior is thus the stage for the light that comes from outside. A luxurious, markedly architectural setting. And empty, uninhabitable except in dreams. Because all these spaces, these inexplicable situations, are made of the stuff of dreams. Equally important are the corridors, the doorways, the passageways, unpredictable spaces.