The new Spanish painting: Dau al Set and El Paso
After the Civil War, and with the upheaval of the Second World War, a period of expectant inactivity occurred in the visual arts of Spain. Spanish artists seemed to ignore the accumulation of experiences that emerged in post-war European painting, especially in the School of Paris and in North America. The first sign of an awakening appeared in Barcelona in 1948 with the founding of a group made up of several young painters and some writers.
Dau al Set
That group was called Dau al Set - Dice to Seven -, a name inspired by a phrase by André Breton: "The seventh face of the dice". The group was formed by Modest Cuixart, Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies and Joan Tharrats, to whom the critic and poet Juan Edmundo Cirlot later joined. All of them published an artistic-literary magazine with a very limited circulation thanks to the activity of Tharrats, who owned a printing press, and the magazine continued to appear long after the group dissolved. Dau al Set was surrealist in tendency and was influenced by Miró, a painter whose components knew him as a countryman, and by Klee. Tàpies was the first to abandon his surrealist imagery in 1952. He was followed by Cuixart in 1954, and Tharrats in 1955.
The work of the former became informal from then on, and he began by incorporating collages of rags, ropes or paper into his paintings, then he refined his technique until he sought, on a smooth immaterial background, the action of a large space on which magical grafismos, symbols or unknown emblems are inscribed with material relief. Cuixart thus leaned towards metallic qualities and obtained silver or dark gold surfaces, reinforcing the sensation of magical or secret objects.
Tharrats also converted to informalism in 1955, but within a category called Tachist. Tachism was a reaction to Cubism and was characterized by spontaneous brushstrokes, drips and stains of paint directly from the tube, and sometimes scribbles reminiscent of calligraphy. His paintings consist of spots or broad strokes invaded by black and dark cracks, as if there were a struggle between color and non-color, conforming a seductive and decorative quality neutralized by the floating mobility of the colored elements.
El Paso
Despite the brevity of their existence, these groups constituted the two foci of radiation of the Spanish avant-garde, and their components form the basis of what is known abroad as the Spanish School. Undoubtedly, other individual values have emerged, but the ex-components of both groups continue to remain firmly at the forefront of the Spanish painting movement.
