The aesthetics of fragility

“Reaffirming fragility remains, even today, a provocative act.” Antoni Llena (Barcelona, ​​1942), a cornerstone of contemporary Catalan art, is also one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Spain. In the 1960s, the Barcelona native embraced arte povera to embrace an aesthetic of fragility and dematerialization that questions the idea of ​​the permanence of the work of art, a work to which he has remained faithful throughout his career.

The artist—as he recounts in his memoirs, published by L'Avenç —has lived a confused and divided life: “I wanted to live with my contradictions unfolding, and I sensed that I could only do so through art.” More than a product, art is, for Llena, a process, a poetic event. Painting is a way of expressing reality in its unspokenness; it is becoming aware of the failure of trying to capture the world, persevering in it, despite everything.

At the age of fifteen, after his father's failed attempt to pass on the surveyor's trade to him, he entered the Capuchin convent in Arenys as a novice. The experience distanced him from the world, but awakened his spirit. Later, at the convent in Sarrià, a friar gave him a subscription to the painting pamphlets I maestri del colore . It was a fruitful event: the history of art was revealed to him in its entirety, and, in his cell, he began to paint. His demands on his work were such that he often filled it to the point of destroying it. One day, he spilled talcum powder on a ruined painting, and an epiphany occurred: "Why did I want to make a painting that was the absolute if life isn't?" From then on, he would seek the absolute in the moment, in its utmost fragility.

His philosophy has given rise to a fragile, intimate, ephemeral, but solidly authentic and poetically perennial work.

This shift defines her ephemeral sculptures (1964–1969), made of paper and shadows, which explore lightness and disappearance; the precariousness of life and memory. Her friendship with Antoni Tàpies, whom she met during the Caputxinada while serving him a bowl of soup at the convent, is fundamental: “I made my way alone, listening to myself. Seeking the same thing as him, but without following in his footsteps.” Tela i paper (1966) is a foundational work and the first attempt at stuffed sculpture, which Llena gave to Tàpies. Also decisive is her encounter with Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, who, in the magazine Serra d'Or in 1969, recognized him as a creator critical of the sacralization of art.

From his earliest works, Llena experimented with impoverished materials (paper, rubber, plastic, glass, wood, etc.), enlivening them with performative elements. In Ombres de paper sobre paret (Paper Shadows on Wall, 1969), the shadows drawn on the wall activate a play of presence and absence, anticipating environmental or site-specific art and addressing the notion of emptiness, central to all of his work. Other pieces beg to be destroyed or modified, such as boxes that must be dismantled, or paintings with talcum powder that reveal the image as their surface dissolves (Pintura sobre superfície amb pols de talc, 1967). With this gesture, the artist eludes the materialist tradition and the object-like nature of the work of art.

In 1969, he co-created Primera mort with Jordi Galí, Sílvia Gubern, and Àngel Jové, considered the first piece of video art in Spain. A pioneer of conceptual art, when it took over, he opted for silence: “I decided not to turn the pursuit of ideas into an artistic career, as I have seen so many others do,” he writes.

Ten years later, he returned to his work with the series Retallables : suspended paper forms that add volume and movement to traditional painting. In the face of transavant-garde, which he considers clichéd and repetitive, he proposes an aesthetic of essentiality: "instead of adding, emptying."

Llena's poetry also inhabits our public spaces. In 1992, in the Plaça dels Voluntaris in Barcelona's Olympic Village, he erected David and Goliath , a metaphor for the small versus the giant and for the artist's resistance to the institutionalized art system. In 2011, in Plaça Sant Miquel, he built Homenatge als Castellers , inspired by the myth of Sisyphus. He is also the author of Món , removed from the façade of El Corte Inglés in Plaza Catalunya after a change of ownership, among other sculptures also found in museums.

“I wanted to live with my contradictions unfolding, and I felt that I could only do so through art,” writes Llena.

In the early 2000s, when technological art began to conquer the art world, Llena preferred to "say new things with old media." Over time, and up until recently, he developed the series of drawings , SOS: Signals of Smoke from the Subsol , made with unfixed colored powder, destined to disappear. His legacy is currently managed by the A/34 gallery; it was there that a MoMA curator, fascinated by the Barcelona artist's work, convinced the New York institution to acquire five of his stuffed sculptures in 2017.

Llena combines artistic creation with theoretical activity and teaching. She has written La gana de l'artista (1999) and Per l'ull de l'art (2008), as well as articles in various media, where she champions artistic practice as a vital necessity and an act of resistance. “To think that art has an immediate social function is nonsense,” she argues, and insists on the intimate dimension of the aesthetic experience: “The truth of art is in the heart, not in the head.” She has taught at the University of Girona and EINA, and her work is included in collections such as those of MACBA, the Reina Sofía, the Museu Tàpies, the Fundació Miró, and MoMA.

A key figure of Catalan postmodernism and the renewal of sculptural and conceptual language in Spain, Llena has often adopted a marginal and critical stance toward the art system, shunning the whims and dynamics of the market. His philosophy has resulted in a work that is fragile, intimate, and ephemeral, yet solidly authentic and poetically enduring. “I have never worked my butt off to get good grades, or to pass competitive exams, or to pursue an artistic career. I have lived, and live, on my knees: always willing and grateful,” he writes in his Memòries de fum.

Antoni Fills Memories of smoke L'Avenç 120 pages 16.15 euros