red that emerges vividly from a dark background. Grau-Garriga constructed his work from fabric off-cuts, mainly jacquard fabrics. We know that the artist was aware of the historical significance of these fabrics, traditionally associated with the bourgeoisie, and he redefines them when he incorporates them into his work. Thus, a fabric that could have formed part of a traditional tapestry – a gobelin – to decorate a bourgeois environment, is here imbued with anti-clericalism, but also with something much more atavistic: a fear of power. Death of a Man, on the other hand, is a recumbent body, now lifeless, made up of rags, fabrics and wood glued to an impassively red canvas. This painting is influenced by the combine paintings of artists of his generation, such as Antoni Tàpies and Robert Rauschenberg,3 with the particularity that Grau-Garriga often used objects he had already used. In his own words: “I hardly ever use elements that do not have some connotation or other concerning me. A constant mixture of life and work. Inseparable”.4 The use of clothing in Grau-Garriga’s works likewise extends to the tapestries. From 1972 onwards, his tapestry advances – literally – from the wall towards the viewer, to the point of becoming, increasingly, a free-standing piece. Màrtir (“Martyr”) and Homenatge a George Orwell (“Homage to George Orwell”), both from 1972, are two model examples: in both we find disembowelled figures hanging by the limbs, like Rembrandt’s flayed oxen. At this point, the artist is greatly influenced by the final convulsions of Franco’s regime. The regime was weakening with the dying dictator, but the establishment, cornered, was becoming more dangerous, reaching its peak with the infamous execution of Salvador Puig Antich in 1974.5 Grau-Garriga pays tribute, on the one hand, to these contemporary martyrs, but also to those who respected and honoured them, such as Orwell with his 1938 book Homage to Catalonia. At that time, the artist was working on Retaule dels penjats (“Altarpiece of the Hanged”, 1972–76), in which he grouped together a series of figures that delved into the idea of the bruised body, in this case with the presence of clothes both of the artist and of those closest to him. Anne Frank (1973) is the paradigm of the existentialist drive – not without a profound political implication – that Grau-Garriga presents in his work of the early 1970s. It is a pale body mortally wounded and suspended, showing its red entrails of suffering to the spectator through the cut that runs lengthwise through it in what, in Parcerisas’s words, is a “violation of the spirit”. Grau-Garriga, in this case, makes his own the paroxysm of the trauma embodied in the suffering of the Jewish people: the Holocaust. Starting from the particular case of the Frank family, the artist
constructs a piece that speaks not only of the most abject face of humanity, but also of the capacity for resistance in the face of absolute horror. The zeitgeist impregnated with existentialism that runs through Grau-Garriga’s blood reds finds another milestone in Temps de ferides (‘Time of Wounds’, 1972), a largescale tapestry in which the ‘violations of the spirit’ found in Anne Frank are repeated. Here, however, there is no defined body, but a lumpy surface that reveals through the openings a red and black interior as a whole. The author appeals here to the trauma not of an individual, but of an entire society. ...I la mort també (“...And Death Too”, 1972) becomes a key piece in the dialogue established between the tormented and vitalistic impulses of the Sant Cugat artist’s sanguine works. This work presents us with a small body that, swollen, splits open and from the opening limbs are born, which refer either to the worms that devour flesh corrupted by death or to leeches that suck the life out of their hosts. The way in which this body opens up to let out the annelid forms inevitably reminds us of the vagina that dilates at the moment of birth. While in the other pieces where Grau-Garriga delves into pain and trauma the negative space – emptiness, loss – predominates, here we find a positive space: the bulge, the protuberance, the belly. Life is born of this volumetric positivity: Gestació (“Gestation”, 1970) is an example of how, even at a time when the artist was still treating the tapestry as an object with its roots nailed to the wall, three-dimensionality advances towards the viewer, in this case to speak to us of the human body’s capacity to generate life. However, in order to harbour life, in addition to the bulk there must be an opening, which is evident in the tapestries of the series Formes de dona (“Women’s Forms”, 1980). Light, interior, exterior: spatial red From the moment Grau-Garriga embarked on his experimental path in contemporary textile expression, red emerged as a tool in its own right when it came to visually – and conceptually – composing his works. Red orders, articulates and also creates; not only in tapestry, but also in painting: examining the way in which the artist uses reds to organise space is a way of examining his relationship with three-dimensionality in art and, ultimately, the way in which the artist relates to his environment. In an early example of Grau-Garriga’s experience with the tapestry Ritme joiós (“Joyful Rhythm”, 1966), we see how he uses a gradation of reds in dialogue with purples and greys around a solar disc, in what looks like luminous rays on a field. This is a piece in which a fully two-dimensional conception of the work still predominates: the chromatic
gradation in stripes accentuates the geometric character of the composition on the plane, while contrasting with the baroque impulse commented on in the sanguine red. Here the artist presents a landscape, a theme he has explored throughout his career, experimenting with the possibilities not only of tapestry (Paisatge a la posta / “Landscape at Sunset”, 1976; Sarcasme I / “Sarcasm I”, 1985) but also of painting (Roig horitzó / “Red Horizon”, 1976). But red is not only used to represent spaces, but also to create them. Utopia? (“Utopia?”, 1976) is an example of metaphysical painting, with echoes of Joan Ponç’s geometries of the late 1960s. Two planes – one red and one black – face each other, floating in space and creating a dimension inside the canvas. Far from falling into an ordinary metaphysical abstraction, Grau-Garriga incorporates via collage elements that link this pictorialism to his life; lived and used objects, such as brushes and paint pots, link Utopia? to the world of things while keeping his gaze fixed on the world of ideas. These confrontations between opposites are repeated, this time physically, in Lligam (“Vínculo”, 1972): two large masses of red are piled up around a void, a hole that becomes the tapestry’s centre. These two halves are joined by a bridge, a “link”, which at one end repeats the gradation of red and purple stripes found in Joyful Rhythm and also in Penetració de llum (“Penetration of Light”, 1972). In the latter case, the red breaks through from the heights towards a large dark green mass, like the rays of light that break through clouds after a summer storm. Pictorially, Grau-Garriga starts from reality, from the concrete, to dilute the form little by little until he reaches the point he wants. Thus, in Solitud d’Alexandra (“Alexandra’s Solitude”, 1977), the artist creates a bourgeois interior using jacquard, traditionally used for wall coverings, and creates a meta-referential discourse to the textile discipline itself: a fabric – which almost becomes a support – that implicitly carries the very history of the rise, splendour and decline of upholstery. Collage, once again, allows the artist to make a double reflection on the medium; on the one hand, pictorial, which he mixes by incorporating objects, fabrics and the frame that should delimit painting; and on the other, textile, whose history he critically glosses over by incorporating fabrics with historical and political awareness. Towards an art that binds everything together: the environament As we said, Grau-Garriga maintains an intense relationship with the landscape: the land, the countryside, the sky, have conditioned his relationship with the world since childhood. This particular experience of the environment also conditioned his artistic
3 In 1969 Grau-Garriga was awarded a scholarship by the Institute of International Education in New York, where he lived for almost a year, while also discovering Canada and Mexico. This stay gave him first-hand experience of the pop art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as the abstract expressionist tradition and the early conceptuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 4 Espinàs, Josep Maria. Identitats: Entrevista a Josep Grau-Garriga. Barcelona: TV3, 4 May 1986. Retrieved from: https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/ alacarta/identitats/josep-grau-garriga/video/2741570/ 5 Parcerisas, Pilar. El ‘Retaule dels penjats’ de Grau-Garriga a la Biennal de Sidney. El Temps de les Arts, 30 August 2020. Retrieved from: https://tempsarts.cat/el-retaule-dels-penjats-de-grau-garriga-a-la-biennal-de-sidney/
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experience. From the 1980s onwards, he began to investigate the work of art that isin-the-world: subject to his circumstances, aware of his own finitude and of his environment, in order to transcend it. With regard to this change of paradigm towards which the artist from Sant Cugat was moving, the installation at the Montmajour Abbey in 19766 was one of the first experiences in which the artist looked at his own work in an inter-relational way: the work became not only that which emerged from his hands, but also took possession of the environment – the abbey, in this case – and the objects found there. Arnau Puig pointed out that “the neutral space of the exhibition must practically disappear. The exhibition has to become, in itself, a work of art; ephemeral, certainly, but a true artistic creation”.7 It is in this way that Grau-Garriga, from the seventies onwards, began a path of spatial experiences that would lead him to the avant-garde of action art. This brings the artist closer to a language that seeks to question the public, almost provocative, where the weight of the space to be occupied by the final work grows exponentially. The spectator, in this new conception of art, ceases to be an external observer of the piece and becomes part of it, physically, but also metaphorically: “when I make an environament (installation), I try to choose old buildings that have a history. [...] The environament integrates people from the street, who get involved in it and are willing to argue for or against it”,8 said the artist. One of the tools with which Grau-Garriga uses to connect the possibilities of the environament is the colour red. A paradigmatic example of the red that seeks involvement is the Sugarbush installation in Vermont, USA, in 1978. In this experience, the artist brought together a group of collaborators who, dressed in red tunics, appropriated a mountain with a ritual that wrapped it in red and black cloth to warn of the ecological imbalance the area was suffering. Baltasar Porcel9 points to this move towards the artistic community as one of the consequences of the artist’s trip to China in 1975, when he became acquainted with the path of the Tao, but also with a socialism implanted in reality that demands the individual’s involvement for the common good. Thus, the colour red allows the artist to appeal to the collective through a common past (as he does in Carcassonne, Perpignan and Gerona), at the same time as this common past – History – creates a political awareness and identity of which Grau-Garriga was fully aware. Vell estendard d’aquí (“Old Standard from
Here”, 1985) is a clear experimentation with the questioning aspect of red: conceived of as a set of flags, it is midway between political vindication and the canopy under which the highest Catholic authorities (and the dictator Franco) shelter. The environament allows Grau-Garriga to defend through art a political position that is inseparable from his own identity. The Monument als segadors (“Monument to the Reapers”), installed in Barcelona’s Plaça de Sant Jaume on 11 September 1979, is the paradigm of the political artistic installation in the Sant Cugat artist’s work. Hundreds of red, yellow and purple sickles (also in homage to the pre-dictatorship Republic) hung from the centre of government in Catalonia, in recognition of the survival of the Catalan nation after forty years of dictatorship and repression. As a flag: political red “I’m from here and I practice it.” Josep Grau-Garriga Grau-Garriga’s first textile lessons were strongly linked to childhood and tradition: popular culture. On the one hand, the animal harnesses at festivals, rugs, the altar cloths and priests’ chasubles; but also the ensigns and banners. It should be remembered that among the biographical aspects that conditioned Grau-Garriga’s life and art is undoubtedly the fact that he was born into a peasant family in Sant Cugat, but also the fact that he was born in a republic and in a left-wing environment. The awareness of belonging to a territory and to a collective is a cross-cutting element in the Sant Cugat artist’s work: we find it in the tapestries resembling landscapes and in the altarpiece hangings, but also in the reapers’ sickles and in the pale gules (red vertical bands) on the senyera or Catalan flag. Grau-Garriga mainly used political red to refer to three themes: the flag, revolution and anarchy. Like other artists of his generation who suffered under the dictatorship (Guinovart, Tharrats, Tàpies, etc.), the Sant Cugat artist was aware of his Catalanness and showed it as early as he could: after Franco’s death in 1975.10 In the same year, we find a small but illustrative example: a jute-woven senyera – a series – commissioned by the collector and cultural patron Joan Baptista Cendrós as a Christmas greeting. From that moment on, the number of senyeras in the artist’s work multiplied, some explicit, such as the senyera commissioned by Cendrós, but also Trencar el marc (“Breaking the Frame”), from 1974, and others that merge with references to the landscape and the land, such as Marges al roig (“Margins in Red”, 1978).
But the senyera is not the only flag Grau-Garriga refers to in his work. As we have said, the artist was born in the Republic and lived through its fall due to the military uprising of 1936. The tricolour flag of the Spanish Republic also appears repeatedly in the Sant Cugat artist’s artistic corpus, both in tapestry and painting. In Com bandera (“Like Flag”, 1978), the artist, starting from a large senyera, interrupts parts of the red stripes with the Republican purple, mixing the identities forged before the outbreak of the Civil War. On the other hand, despite never having been affiliated with any political party, Josep Grau Garriga was sympathetic to left-wing movements and anti-Francoism, which is why we also find references to communism and revolution in his work. Spring ’77 (1977) is evidence of this affinity: with the title, the artist refers to 9 April 1977, when the transitional government legalised the Communist Party. Grau-Garriga’s proximity to the left and communism is reaffirmed in his work Ideologia (“Ideology”, 1978), produced after a trip to China in the mid-1970s, where he became acquainted with the reality of the Cultural Revolution. In this work, on paper, the author sticks pages from a book in Chinese and writes the word “revolution” underneath in red paint. Despite the fact that he came to China at a time of decadence due to the proximity of Mao’s death in 1976, Ideology takes us back to the idealisation of the Maoist revolution in the West – particularly in certain Francophile circles to which Grau-Garriga was close – which ended up being mythologised to the point that Mao Zedong’s Red Book became a fetish, an object that every leftist and progressive person had to have in order to be recognised as such. Red, in addition to communism and revolution, also forms part of the symbolism of another branch of the political spectrum: anarchism. The Red and the Black – which Grau-Garriga also pays homage to in a piece dedicated to Stendhal’s book – play an important role in the symbolism linked to the Republican side in the Civil War. The CNT-FAI played a decisive role in the constitution of the Popular Front and the fight against fascism. The Sant Cugat artist appeals on several occasions to anarchism, both in the title and in the content of his works. Àcrata (1980) is a painting in which Grau-Garriga sticks together red and black fabrics and wood, while the frame that should surround and delimit the painting is cut up and disordered by the collage piece. Moreover, the wooden strips project from the pictorial plane and extend beyond it, in an obvious analogy to the break
6 In this installation, Grau-Garriga set up for the first time the Altarpiece of the Hanged, made up of seventeen figures (with Martyr, from 1972, in the centre) and red string in the main apse of the abbey. Other figures were also installed in the side chapels, making the installation extensive to the whole building. Arnau Puig spoke of this particular installation as ‘a strange sensation, a mixture of beauty and horror’. Puig, Arnau. Grau-Garriga. Barcelona: Polígrafa, 1988, p. 268–272. 7 Ibid. p. 244. 8 Espinàs, Josep Maria. Op cit. 9 Porcel, Baltasar. Grau-Garriga en el todo, 1978. 10 Although there are some earlier examples, such as his environament Monument a l’esperança (“Monument to Hope”, Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1973) or the tapestry L’or i... (“Gold and...”, 1974), most references to Catalan nationality, and particularly to the senyera, appear after the dictator’s death in 1975.
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