Matèria en forma de peu, 1965, Mixed media on canvas, 130 x 162 cm.

Antoni Tapies is dead today in Barcellona. He was 89. Count Giuseppe Panza wrote these beautiful lines on him:

«Never in human history there were many dead in half a century (between 1914 and 1945, ed). The Reason, having lost her subjection to a higher law, could justify every crime. If the Russian intelligentsia were not consenting to a rigid ideological obedience was right to remove it, if the middle class could not be collectivist had to be destroyed, if the Jews could not be of sincere nationalists were to be burned in a furnace. When there is no longer the expectation of another world, and there is only this world, the goal justifies the means, if happiness is on earth, must be made ​​at any cost.
Tàpies expressed the crisis, the loss of this way of thinking. It was more intense than ever the need to get out of this destructive spiral to find other certainties, other hopes.
His paintings had the colors of the desert, where there is no life, a land oftangled long gone by convulsions, with some rare sign of a remote human presence, as if they had given up living there while waiting for an imminent apocalypse. The expectation of something extraordinary, who was to come, perhaps terrible, even salvation».

Giuseppe Panza, Ricordi di un collezionista, Jaka Book, 2006 (pp 58-59)