How to begin talking about one of the greatest symbols of Catalan and Spanish artistic culture in the 20th century? Perhaps making a few basic statements will help: for instance, we might point out that, from the late 1940s onwards, Tàpies remained on the front line of Western artistic renewal; or that this fact, combined with the early acclaim earned from international critics, has made him a veritable legend in the recent history of Western art. The year 1958 was undoubtedly a pivotal moment in this whole process, with the individual hall reserved for him at the Venice Biennale and the first prize awarded by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, but by then Antoni Tàpies was already a creator admired for his originality and ability to communicate through symbols and matter. After 1958, of course, the admiration would increase and spread.

Having inherited the vitalist attitudes and ideas of the early avant-garde movements, in the autumn of 1948 he became one of the founders of a group that had much in common with those modern pioneers, Dau al Set, whose aesthetics are clearly defined by the exhibition poster in the Banco Santander Collection. That poster is rife with allusions to Surrealism and to the lyricism of Joan Miró and Paul Klee, and is also a splendid example of the dreamlike atmosphere that defined a collective whose flame would nevertheless burn for only a few short years.

After the mid-1950s Tàpies's language underwent a decisive transformation, although the symbolic aspect and the quest for universal communication of the previous period maintained and even increased their expressive power. While his art from that time is usually labelled as a brand of Art Informel, I feel it is overly simplistic to identify that quintessentially post-World War II art with the consistent practice that defined our artist for nearly sixty years. In short, Tàpies needs no labels or group affiliations in order to be appreciated. His genius strides alone through the history of contemporary art.

The collection boasts several truly remarkable works by Tàpies, many of them made in the brilliant decade of the 1960s. In Pintura, tierra, collage y cordel [Paint, Earth, Collage and String] (1964), the combination of flexible geometric shapes with the organic forms of clumps of earth in the corners creates an almost invisible tension heightened by the shadow of the strings and the sandy painted surface.

In Materia ocre sobre tela virgen [Ochre Matter on Virgin Canvas] (1969), the presence of paint is more obvious and very close to the gesture of graffiti, while the surface is wrinkled to the point that it resembles the textures of skin—but a scratched, scraped, pierced skin that convincingly conveys the impression of physical exhaustion. Chronologically situated between these two works, Ventana al vacío [Window onto the Void] (1965) focuses even more on the pictorial treatment of the surface, always dominated by impressions, grattage and a sense of incompleteness.

Llit [Bed] (1976) and Self-Portrait (1978), though less intense in my opinion, nevertheless maintain—as is almost always the case with Tàpies—a gestural freshness, a desire to experiment and an intuitive ability to elicit all sorts of emotions in the viewer, chief among them a sense of wonder at an ongoing discovery. [Javier Pérez Segura]