Antoni Tàpies (b. 1923)

Set against a dark, mottled but also richly-coloured surface, El Foc de les Espines (The Fire of Thorns) presents an illuminating firework-like display of colourful abstract splashes, strange geometries and precise, needlepoint-like incisions of glyph and symbol all combining into a magical and mysterious landscape of figures. Painted in 1949, it is one of a series of works known as Tàpies's 'magic paintings' made in the late 1940s and early 1950s that appear to reveal, within the structure of painting itself, a surreal, underground or hidden world of magic and fantasy using a combination of intuitive figurative representation, geometric abstraction and personal symbol. Evolving out of Tàpies' earlier explorations of symbol using rough, earthy materials, it was these works that were the first to gain Tàpies' an international reputation and also to lay the foundations of his later practice involving the complete integration of unconscious impulse within the material surface of the work itself.

Tàpies' 'magic paintings' were created at a time when the artist was closely involved with the staunchly Catalan group of poets and painters known as the Dau al Set (Seven faced die) founded by the poet Joan Brossa. The Dau al Set's principles were rooted in the Surrealists' embracing of magic and the occult as a way of charting the unconscious. In the visual arts the group particularly admired the work of Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Joan Miró, all of whose influence can be determined in Tàpies' painterly style of this period. The Dau al Set's embracing of these 'black' arts was also in keeping with their sense of their art being an essentially 'underground' activity.

One of the first of Tàpies' 'magic' paintings El Foc de les Espines (The Fire of Thorns) attempts to reveal a magical world of symbol and imaginative possibility seemingly lying latent within the constituent parts - the form, colour, symbolism and painterly technique - of the art of picture -making. Emulating the glyph-like creations of Joan Miró and Paul Klee, Tàpies has in such works, devolved his own pictorial language of form to create a world that, with its materializing figures, crescent moons and prickly cats, recalls strongly the atmosphere of a magical realist story such as Mikhail Bulgakov's clandestine novel The Master and Margharita. Largely delineated using a sequence of needlepoint-like incisions into the paint reminiscent of etching and reflective perhaps of the poetic title of the painting, the mysterious figures in this picture are shown walking upon a chessboard road that appears to project from somewhere within the painting.

In an interesting anticipation of his own later self-immersion into the material surface of his paintings, the most prominent of the figures seemingly created by this illuminating display of form and symbol is that of a playfully smiling figure holding a mischievous looking cat. Both immersed in and seemingly emerging from the picture this fantasy figure bears a close resemblance to Tàpies himself.