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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/ 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.

with the State proposed by anarchist doctrine. Monument a l’anarquia (“Monument to Anarchy”, 1976), in turn, shows us a different approach: the artist metaphorically elevates a movement that defends the opposite, horizontality, subverting subversion. Monument to Anarchy is a free-standing sculptural tapestry more than two metres high, configured from the interweaving of red and black clumps and strips with jute fibres, creating a dense interior curtain of red and black threads. In addition, the artist conceived this piece so that it could also be mounted in the manner of his personages (Martyr, Homage to George Orwell, etc.), by hanging from above like a large, wounded body.

VELL ESTENDARD D’AQUÍ Esther Grau

“Environament”

Historical monuments or nascent architectures, spaces in use or in disuse, fields, forests or gardens, streets or public squares became warps adopted by Grau-Garriga on which he wove large volumetric collages. Tapestries, wood, ropes, paint, scrap metal, fabrics, drawings and projects coexisted in particular ephemeral contexts, which he called environaments. (This is a term he used habitually and naturally, which he adapted from the English word “environment”.) The verb “to environ” should exist to describe the transformation of spaces that he achieved by creating environments full of symbolic messages in his own language. Montage, installation, performance ... these words do not quite convey all of what Grau-Garriga “environed”. Each environament was a unique project, a fresh vital, artistic adventure that he undertook enthusiastically, developing in an endlessly dynamic spirit. He immersed himself in the history of the places where he would work. (His projects are replete with notes and handwritten references associated with their architecture or the natural environment.) He documented the experiences, anecdotes and details of people who lived or had lived in the place, along with their culture. He studied the buildings and their settings in depth – stones, vegetation, climate, light – soaking up these new universes, penetrating and immersing himself in them. He linked himself to them by internally creating interpretations that, little by little, via his thought embodied in drawings and projects, took shape to then be reified in large assemblies that braided together what had become his own. “To environ” was to give life to places others had previously experienced so as, via personal interpretation, rescue their essence and contribute to their architectural, social, ecological, ideological or political enhancement.

Vell estendard d’aquí

In 1985, Grau-Garriga exhibited for the first time the set of four tapestries entitled Vell estendard d’aquí (“Old banner from here”) in the cloister of the Sant Cugat del Vallès monastery. On that occasion the works formed part of an environament located in the cloister’s corridors, in which he included old lamp posts, iron bars, wood and ropes. In 1986 he created a fresh environament of Vell estendard d’aquí, at the Abbaye des Cordeliers, in Châteauroux, France. This one was likewise created in wood and strings, but in a very different way from the one he had created the year before in the Sant Cugat monastery. In fact, the very sculptural adaptation of the pieces gave them an appearance that could even resemble other works. Lastly, in 1989, he installed “aèriament” (“aerially”), the four tapestries that comprise Vell estendard d’aquí at the Gare de l’Est in Paris. On this occasion they hung naked, with no further elements.

Vell estendard d’aquí, 2021

In planning the exhibition “Grau-Garriga: Reds”, the prominence that the numerous environaments the artist had created throughout his career acquired in this project, while not forgetting the painting and tapestry, we began to consider the idea of a monastery installation. The pieces that make up Vell estendard d’aquí had been stored for many years in the Grau-Garriga family’s artwork storage space. In an active four-way meeting – including the exhibition curators, Àlex Mitrani and Jordi Garrido, and Andreu Dengra, the director of Visual Arts at Sant Cugat City Council’s Cultural Service – we explored the idea of bringing them to light. What could be more appropriate than once again installing, in the same venue as its premiere, a montage in which red was likewise the star? Should the elements comprising Vell estendard d’aquí be exhibited alone or with other materials? Would they be installed in the same cloister corridors as Grau-Garriga had used? Should they take the same layout? So, via reflections shared in subsequent meetings (online during the Covid-19 pandemic), and multiple WhatsApp messages, these initial concerns were gradually dispelled. We could not – nor did we wish to – reproduce Grau-Garriga’s environament as he had done. We are not him, and Grau-Garriga never reproduced the same environament, even if he used the same works. This made things both easier and more complicated: we were freer, but had the responsibility of staging a work that respected Grau-Garriga’s essence. It was helpful to change the setting. The cloister corridors, exposed to the weather during the months the environament would last, bearing their current daily visitor traffic, did not seem the best option. The chapter hall, on the other hand, was an open space located in the same cloister but protected and contained. It offered an ideal setting. An old documentary on Grau-Garriga offered images of installing the work Monument a l’anarquia (“Monument to anarchy” 1976) in the Sant Cugat monastery cloister. This piece, part of the current exhibition “Grau-Garriga: Reds” at Can Quitèria, was exhibited by Grau-Garriga in different ways. This versatility allowed us to appreciate its fabrics and volumes from different perspectives. Why not display it hung in the monastery in a new way, to coincide with the installation we were planning? It could represent a fabulous opportunity to make the work’s richness more palpable by showing two ways of installing it within the same exhibition. Fresh doubts then arose: Should Monument a l’anarquia be installed inside or outside the chapter house? Should it be integrated within Vell estendard d’aquí, or totally independent? After weighing up the pros and cons of the different options, the presence of its emblematic red – both a banner and monument in ephemeral communion as symbols of identity, one community-focussed, the other political – and the strength that we foresaw in the synergy between the works, led us to choose to integrate all the pieces in the same space. Detailed observation of previous incarnations of the Vell estendard d’aquí and the construction of a scale model of the chapter hall with the works installed, allowed us to experiment with different installation options. The idea was, on the basis of previous montages, to imagine possible assemblies that would respect the atmosphere of the whole while at the same time favouring viewing of each work individually. In addition, including Monument a l’anarquia required a greater effort of integration. It was key to think about the distribution of the works in the room, taking into account their dimensions, volumes and materials, along with their consequent visual weight, the balance between falls and tensions – an important aspect in Grau-Garriga’s installations – and the heights and inclinations of the works so as to enhance how the light fell in the transparency of the warps. Finally, in early April we had a fairly precise idea of what the overall installation would look like, though we knew that when it came to the moment of truth there would be changes in situ. In the third week of May we would begin the assembly with the same enthusiasm with which months earlier we had fantasised about a new Vell estendard d’aquí.

Installation of Vell estendard d’aquí and Monument a l’anarquia in the Chapter Hall (May 2021)

As in any project in which a group of people come together to achieve a goal in a limited time, assembly involved collaboration and the sum of our energies. It was the interaction of experiences, the conjunctural coming together of professional and personal experiences that created an ephemeral team, an entity with its own personality that functioned through ever-astonishing mutual empowerment. Three intense days of work, brimming with moments that filled one’s mental palette with colour, leaving behind this accumulated residue, an accumulated bulk in which the density and patience of the months of prior preparatory work were woven into the project’s dynamic, fast-paced realisation. It is impossible to describe a process during which so many things occur and overlap – in just three days! Certain instants serve as tiny beacons to guide one’s memory: instants such as when Jordi stated with clarity that such a piece, for visual balance, could only work in that particular spot in the room; or when Isaac explained the points that suited a particular tension, offering alternatives to compensate the forces between two works; or when Aida, in the midst of movement, paused to delicately repair the unravelled threads on a bar; or when Andreu tried out various solutions to attain the desired inclination at a certain point; or when Martí, in mid-assembly, sent a photo to explain the moment’s dynamism in an image; or when faced with a doubt to resolve, I found myself thinking: “How would he do it?”; or when we frantically chose sticks and ropes to tie up installation’s centre and, in a final symbolic, collective effort – both physical and mental – we resolved the conflict that had had the team beat for a while (on how efficiently and coherently to resolve the central link between the pieces). We finally tied the knot. “Hapticity in its purest state”, wrote an artist friend of mine when she saw photos of the assembly. That seems to me an impeccable definition: the number of atoms of a ligand directly attached to a central atom in a coordination compound. The assembly is the culmination of a process, a staging in which all the efforts, prior rehearsals, and moreover the ability to improvise come into play. But it is also essentially the creation of the stage where things will occur, where people will remain in silence or be accompanied by the ringing of bells, where the dialogue of light and shade that is created in the pieces throughout the day will awaken emotions. Vell estendard d’aquí will stimulate internal conversations from which people will explain and ponder each work as well as the whole, stimulating more spontaneous or more elaborate interpretations and discourses. Sant Cugat Monastery, the setting chosen by Grau-Garriga for his first environament of Vell estendard d’aquí, will once again become a space to harbour one’s thoughts and rest one’s gaze. Old-standard-from-here. A vestige of what represents us, shreds of what were once powerful symbols, a representation of deep roots recovered, wounded and damaged, returning the essences transformed by time. It is a standard, and this evokes the proclaimed essentiality of what we are. It does so through the contrasting colours, the light and strength of red linked to the weight of darkness. It is old, as evidenced by the cuts and fissures, holes that sometimes leave the warps bare. And it is from here. It identifies us by highlighting the contradictions between the majesty of the pieces and their ensemble, along with transformations imprinted by the very passage of time. In the background, Monument a l’anarquia stands imposing. We perceive it vaguely as we enter the room through what might be an eye woven into the tapestry opening the installation. The heavy door of the old wounded standard allows a promise of light, the ideal that once inside, the room acquires grandeur in its presence. But when we approach, the fibres’ ductility, even fragility, and the cords behind falling like tears to the floor offer nuances, placing us afresh in the uncomfortable tessitura of contradiction. The installation questions us about everything containing complexity. If this so, we will have achieved our main goal, to recover and give visibility to Grau-Garriga’s spirit through his works, the richness of complexity. “... Although they are like multi-purpose sculptures, each individually having their own interest, when placed together they create this ephemeral atmosphere where the space and its quality, the distribution of light, whether or not there is vegetation ... All this makes it possible to create this atmosphere, different on each occasion, because the different arrangement of the elements in a specific place constitutes a whole of particular sculptural interest.” Grau-Garriga (From the documentary Josep Grau-Garriga in the series Le tecniche e il gusto on the Italian TV channel RAI.)

TEXTURES OF RED IN THE MIDDLE AGES Rosa Alcoy

Sometimes colour is thought of as an abstract value, or allied to abstraction, adopted to translate or make visible emotional realities that are denser, more expressive or confused. Using the analogy of a rainbow, I prefer, however, to understand it as a factor in the design itself which, generated by light, will enigmatically unite the sun and rain, going further than outdated pacts or alliances between gods and men. Whether or not we accept the balance of such a prodigious coalition between colour and drawing, the absorbent capacity of the dominant tonalities, which do not mask nuances or transitions, they may also be transfigured into a concrete, specific and tangible value which, in turn determined by a texture, qualifies the surfaces, gives them character and reveals their most intimate materiality, between disturbing shadows and lights, beyond the prefixed spectrum or the model or theme to be reproduced. I do not overlook the fact that colour also camouflages and can become the chameleon-like omen that leads us into the meaning of painting and art, because – perhaps it needs to be pointed out – we are talking about the colour of artistic matter. Following this path, it would be as unserious to affirm that colour is alien to meaning, and to the symbolic imaginary, as it would be to consider that it is not a stable ally of aesthetics. Colour comforts the discovery of illuminated reality in order to end up building, with guaranteed returns to darkness, the ideality or naturalistic frenzy that should make it agree better or worse with the corresponding subject. To choose the nature of colour in order to talk about red and texture in medieval art is an ambitious goal, and this brief essay does not pretend to go through all the possible registers, nor can it exhaust a well-structured range of ideas that would oblige us to pay longer attention to the colour of blood. Equating red to this liquid, vital element already has consequences. Firstly, because there is a wide range of reds to be integrated within a register that interacts with others and, secondly, because the link established makes it advisable to take into account the symbolic saturation that governs, with more than evident amplitude, the idea of red transformed into a sign of cuts, wounds and violent deaths of vast impact in medieval representations. The theme brings us to all kinds of open wounds that have been depicted to evoke martyrs and capital punishments, starting with those inflicted on Christ in the scourging or on Calvary, some of which have become an autonomous icon surrounded by the Arma Christi. Then follow the tortures and decapitations of saints and other figures, with necks finally turned into veritable volcanoes of blood. From the delicate streaks that Giotto and other masters of his time painted in these tragic passages, we can move on to the spilling of coagulated blood that creates real streams of dark red and volumetric red in the bloodiest Gothic works, prefiguring the exasperated gaze on the sorrowful Christ that some polychrome carvings offer while, at the other extreme, Matthias Crünewald’s painting does likewise. Shunning the red of blood in Romanesque or early Gothic formulations is not the same as denying the plasticity of the red reborn on the painter’s ‘looms’ to create fictitious clothing for a wide variety of figures. Without forgetting hats, headpieces and shoes, the mantles and tunics of some of the Marys and, where appropriate, of the Virgin herself or Saint Peter are striking. The smoother, softer canvases – or flatter if we are talking about painting – progressed in tactile quality, and in feigned volumes, as we move towards the late Gothic and the experiences of oil painting were consecrated, with Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden drawing out a thread with enormous possibilities. No fabric seems to escape the red dye that leaves a universal trace, colouring silks, wools, linens and cottons. Some fabrics are coarse and porous, but others aspire to the sophistication of silver napkins and blend purples, scarlets and golds with a thousand threads to conquer velvets with seeming brocades. The colour red infiltrates everywhere, either combined with other colours, or immaculate and, found as an intruder or an exceptional guest, it can be invested with the most striking or artificial shades. Although he describes imaginative alternatives in architecture, walls, mosaics, curtains, pavements, costumes and figurative objects, it is clear that the incarnation also bursts out in painted nature, whether from some fruits and flowers, from a certain idea of the red sea, the sun or fire, which burns to be reborn, almost petrified, at the foot of the sculptural Envy in the Scrovegni chapel, a space where, moreover, and following well-known Byzantine patterns, the fire crosses the blackness that gives access to Avernus, like a great ball dissolved in powerful flames. In this famous group in the city of Padua, Giotto branches the transcendental fire until it reaches the reddish rocks that form the limits of Hell. This register of burning clarity that covers the landscape backgrounds of the earth after the Last Judgement is now born of the light that envelops the Giottoesque God Judge within a spectrum that, from the inside out, plays with blue, white and orangey-yellow, favouring transitions to red and maroon pigmentations. As indicated by the divine halo, the flaming stain passes through the universe of evil without any problem, and the Christ, who

crowns the theatre of Judgement, also wears the colour of blood. We know that during the Gothic period there is no lack of similar and revealing cases of a very significant choice. Red will also clothe other more common figures from a very wide repertoire, but the chromatic spectacle created by the gods and the fashions linked to the uses of the clothing of high medieval ecclesiastics is unquestionable, Gothic presages of the cinematographic recreation of general scope that is described in Federico Fellini’s Rome, from the effervescent energy, visual and sonorous, of an unforgettable catwalk. Red and purple reveal equally real identities that clearly point to Saint Jerome as the guarantor of all kinds of visible solemnities that, founded on the explosion of red, dilate some of the numerous cardinal colleges. If fidelity to the local colour is often perceived, this option in some cases pushes the limits of what is possible. Thus, the horse with a reddish coat can be the red horse (or sorrel) that travels through the Apocalypse, once again linked to war, swords and blood. On the other hand, we enjoy a fantastic world that recreates diverse natures. In medieval painting, an enraged seven-headed dragon is no rarity and, beyond the magical blood it carries, it can wreak optical havoc when dressed in fiery red in certain well-known English manuscripts (or other settings), emphasising swollen pride, which brings it closer to evil and to the red tones attributed to the hides or skins of some unruly demons. It is not surprising that the angels’ wings or garments – some of them from head to toe – are covered in fiery red, as in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise or in the scene of Balaam’s fall in the Prague Bible. We are not surprised because we know that there are fiery angels who embody the most spiritual and luminous beings in the images of seraphim and cherubim, whether blue or red. Even if I think of the degradation of the reddish wings of one of Pietro Cavallini’s angels, I prioritise the panel of the Virgin in Jean Fouquet’s Melun Diptych, even if the work takes us to the limit of this discourse when it approaches the dynamics of a Northern Renaissance, a concept that widens or narrows depending on the author. The fact is that the border between late Medieval art and Fouquet’s creations seems to me to be fine and facilitates the transition to angels who describe, beyond the biblical seraphim of the flaming sword, an ideal formula for speaking of tactile perceptions. Made of incombustible luminous matter, they seem to turn their inner fire into ceramic. Associated with the highest temperatures, these beings are only one step away from melting this enamel, or vibrant reddish porcelain, into glass, and thus from making us enter the parallel world of stained glass. On the horizon of glass or crystal, where the impenetrable hardness and transparency of the material would be essential, red is a less luminous colour than blue, and its opaquer densities are not far removed from the pasty radiance of Fouquet’s reified angels, remarkable, like their bluish colleagues, for the contrast they create with the Virgin and Child by Étienne Chevalier (1410–1474) . The two are equalled by the fact that they have a very fine epidermis, which makes the connection with the incomparable white of the transitive human and divine skins more evident. This, in accordance with the tones on Mary’s mantle, equate her and the Christ Child with the pearls that decorate the throne. Fouquet’s panel is a rounded creation destined for a king’s treasurer, emerging from a style that rides on the international Gothic and draws on the Flemish avant-garde, both of which would be implausible without the discoveries of a Trecento that surrendered to the art of Giotto and his companions. Red, then, runs through the Middle Ages, rich in transformative suggestions, in plastic ideas and in material meanderings that allow me to affirm, in mentioning its tensions, that Catalan medieval painting used it quite wholeheartedly. An extensive journey through the somewhat nearer Romanesque and Gothic periods would enable such a confirmation, but I will limit myself to recalling the fame of Lluís Borrassà’s reds. I would highlight the use of such reds in works like the main altarpiece of the Santes Creus monastery, a commission inherited by Borrassà’s workshop, which was first taken on by Guerau Gener, another excellent painter who made the most of his contacts with the finest masters of the Valencian school of international Gothic. The specific cases help to describe a tradition that Joan Mates and Rafael Destorrents likewise passionately defended. It goes without saying that medieval reds familiarise us with codes that already have their roots in the art and painting of the ancient world. As I noted at the beginning, the applications of colour unite certain desires and demands for perspectives seeking balance and chromatic appeal in the stories told or in the motifs represented, even if at some point a single note contradicts us. Contexts and social conventions always determine some of the axes of pigmentary discourse, but not all of them. The good use of coats of arms and heraldic enamels, whether gules or purple, in the case in point, had to find their niche, as in other forms of painting, in a rich universe full of colour. Leaving aside the loose wefts offered by the monochrome option, red is surrounded by other active colours which modify it, prompting us to think of Josef Albers’ pictorial experiments with the interaction of colour. We should celebrate that the theatrical, changing red that expansively invades the threads of art in the Middle Ages now comes to thrill us Josep Grau i Garriga’s work. He is a creator of new woven experiences who, in the huge plastic strength of the work he creates, pulls us back to the contemporary world, with forceful and fascinating, voluminous and warm forms. Bien entendu l’énonciation historique des événements est indépendante de leur vérité “objective”. Seul compte le dessein “historique”de l’écrivain. [Understood correctly, the historical announcement of events is independent of their “objective” veracity. Only the writer’s “historical”purpose counts.] Émile Benveniste, 1966

The etymological relationship of weaving to text is clearly visible in many Latin languages. Why should we link writing, which neatly adds letter after letter, line upon line, to the procedure of a loom in which the threads are interwoven into a single material, thanks to the magic of the interweaving of warp and weft? Depending on how it is viewed, this parallelism is not so obvious. Weaving is tangible and material, whereas language, even if written, remains ungraspable and elusive. It is difficult to see any connection between them. However, it is interesting to force the mind to trace the way in which the Latin verb texere – in the sense of “to weave” – gradually acquires autonomy as a participle, until it becomes a noun as solid and evident as the actual ‘text’. When we write, we “weave” words, that is, we build a firm and solid whole out of scattered elements. Texts are a versatile, useful material, like a freshly made piece of cloth. We can reuse a text, cutting it out and making new verbal messages, just as we do with fabrics, which are both an end product and the raw material for an infinite number of invisible objects, to the extent that we have internalised their everyday presence. Do the newspaper we read every morning or the jeans we hastily put on reveal this supposed etymological proximity? Naturally we never think about it. It is relatively easy to pursue the metaphor in the direction of using the concept of weaving as a mirror in which the text is reflected, a finished whole, a final product within which the language has already set and can be examined. But can we walk this path in reverse? That is, can we think of the fabric, its stubborn materiality and dumbness, as a text? Can the interwoven warp and weft appropriate the text’s inherent quality, which is the capacity to speak, convey meaning, establish communication? To enter Josep Grau i Garriga’s poetic universe is to take this path in the opposite direction. His weavings have meaning. But to say that weaving is text here is a hasty conclusion. Can we really “read” tapestries? No, there is no alphabet or orthography that allows us such direct access. The analogies are convoluted so we must analyse them cautiously. Among Grau-Garriga’s earliest paintings is the image of a simple blue curtain covering a window. Començament (“Beginning”) was painted in 1942 in gouache on paper. Outside the light is good, but the interior is shady and, precisely for this reason, pleasant. The few elements visible in the frame – an inch of rough, deep ochre wall and the ceiling with wooden beams – suggest a Mediterranean world on a midsummer’s day. The curtain is that indispensable veil that promises calm, stillness, protection from an exterior where noise and heat reign supreme. But the narrative we can extract from a simple curtain in front of the window has taken us too far from what we need to analyse. It does not matter what this painting’s context is, nor what it represents, where it was painted, what it wants to convey, or even this atmosphere of intimacy that is so well achieved. What matters is “seeing” the curtain. From the moment the tapestries begin to detach from the wall and become textile structures, Grau-Garriga’s works might be interpreted as an obstacle comparable to that early bluish curtain. The artist confronts us with the fact that the exterior and interior are separated by an opaque yet meanwhile transparent fabric, making it possible to pass from indoors to outdoors and from the exterior to the interior. In doing so, he brings us face to face with the materiality of language. Baltasar Porcel wrote in one of his reviews that Grau-Garriga’s textile devices were “alive like an animal”. It is not only the tapestries that are alive, it is important to understand this. The artist knew how to keep exhorting us to look at what we do not usually see. To achieve this, a simple curtain became transformed into dense knots, torn fabrics, reused brocades, in an interventionism in space that literally made us stumble over these textile obstacles. Behind them there is always that same intention of establishing a direct relationship with the viewer, saying “Look at me”, or even “Touch me”. Grau-Garriga’s work demands that we become aware of the presence of what is invisible because it has been seen too often, become habitual. To begin with, everyday objects are invisible because we use them – as it were – without ever seeing them. But what is more invisible is the continuous presence of language. We think in language and we communicate thanks to the ability of speech, but we never see this presence. We take it for granted that we are linguistic animals. Precisely because of this we cannot maintain any sort of critical attitude towards the matter that serves us to express ourselves, to communicate and also to feel who we are. It seems to us that words are neutral elements with which we construct discourses or texts according to certain rules that must be acquired and internalised. As long as our linguistic communication is invisible to us, we cannot introduce any nuances into it. So we speak and write mechanically as if we were a noisy loom that simply copies what is written on the cardboard. When we enter the rooms where we come face to face with Grau-Garriga’s works, where red becomes a political sign, the question of the kinship between text and fabric becomes especially penetrating. On the guided tour offered to me by the curators Àlex Mitrani and Jordi Garrido, we were also accompanied by the artist’s daughter, Esther Grau. When we paused before Monument a l’anarquia (“Monument to Anarchy”, 1976), Esther took one of those ribbons that protrude as if they were real handles, and arranged the threads to fall smoothly. It was an automatic gesture, done without thinking, as someone might fix the collar of a friend’s shirt or smooth the wrinkles from one’s dress. She acted as someone who has grown up among these three-dimensional artefacts, like someone who knows that monuments are a stone we must stumble over – not some untouchable site that one may only venerate. Josep Grau-Garriga’s vast world incessantly weighs up the presence of man in the world. This is precisely why it is evident that the artist had to use all those politically connoted symbols of the sixties and seventies to examine them closely. His tapestries are tinged with the promise of communism – including Mao’s Red Book, which the curators have adroitly placed at one side – while the Catalan flag, la senyera, which recovered its prominence in the years of transition from Franco’s regime, signifying a promise of change, also bursts into them. But if the artist were to use a linear rhetoric, he could have had little impact. Grau-Garriga does not quote the committed language of his time, nor has he assumed the role of spokesman for any kind of slogan. On the contrary, these textile sculptures materialise symbols and invite us to examine them. Flags are, by definition, two-dimensional. Flags are flat like paper so that school children can draw them without too much effort. Flags are flat so that they can be reproduced and distributed everywhere when the need arises. In contrast, what purpose does an individualised flag, made into a textile sculpture – “alive like an animal” – serve? Grau-Garriga aims to make visible the desire for change that we attribute to ideals. His banners show a path, they are made of the dimension of hope. They are not confirmations of goals achieved and even less so objects of collective and mandatory veneration. We must bear in mind that, just like the simple blue curtain of 1942, it does not really matter what message banners like Sense títol (“Untitled”, 1975), Senyera (“Catalan Flag”, 1975), Monument a l’anarquia (“Monument to Anarchy”, 1976), Primavera del 77 (“Spring ’77”, 1977), Marges al roig (“Margins in Red”, 1978) or Àcrata (“Anarchy”, 1980) should convey. It would be too simple, it would be a simple slogan, to try to “translate” these works into a text with a message. Again, here it is above all a question of ‘seeing’ the curtain. By becoming aware of the presence of language we already take that decisive step that can disintegrate the inertia of slogans. We need to realise that we can transmit fiery messages only through standardised, ossified language. With this gesture, Grau-Garriga denies symbols all their immediate power, all the power of blind identification demanded by the banners with which schoolchildren greet their leaders, demanded by the industrial fabrics hanging from ever taller and more majestic flagpoles – likewise today. The remnants of a red and yellow striped cloth are for the artist mere scraps, alongside other reused materials, to construct pictorial ensembles that dignify the waste material. But, above all, political ideals have acquired here the dimension of a singular, unrepeatable body. They are a full presence that strives to make visible every thread, every gesture of the hand that has woven them together. So the shared story is no longer a slogan to be shouted at the top of one’s lungs, with eyes blind and deaf ears. The community is conceived of then as a living organism that is continually being woven and unwoven, where every thread counts. The whole is the sum of volitions and intentions. To us, from a distance, 1960s and 1970s Europe seems a quiet time, the definitive consolidation of a welfare society in which we still live. When we speak of signs of revolt, we think of student disobedience in Paris or Prague, the sexual revolution or changes in clothing that helped overthrow social hierarchies. We do not often think that thanks to the influence of Russian structuralism – a viewpoint originating in a highly turbulent period – European thinkers began to examine the structure of language itself under a magnifying glass. All authoritarian ideologies panic in the face of analytical capacity. Art, if tolerated in oppressive environments, becomes mere decoration that helps (greatly!) to blur reality as it is and to allow only the force of slogans to be felt. Grau-Garriga is, on the other hand, an analytical thinker, and it is possible that he has become a meticulous investigator both of surrounding reality and collective dreams, precisely because he worked with fabrics. Working with the structure of warp and weft has forced him to think of any whole as a composition made up of basic elements that continually weave their coexistence. Nothing is determined in advance. Society is constructed. It is not surprising, therefore, that his artistic stamp is often consciously ephemeral or that he creates open ensembles with amalgams of objects that are close to each other in a very lively everyday life. Everything this artist does – like many other rebels of his generation – is a plea against the totalisation of experience. It is important that we understand that this attitude is not accidental, it is not a stroke of genius or a trend in vogue, but that behind this capacity for ‘de-structuring’ there is a very strong historical conscience. The totalitarianisms of the 20th century rested on unalterable symbols and it is these inertias that had to be deconstructed. In the same years, Émile Benveniste reflected on “man in language” in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Problems in General Linguistics, 1966). With the meticulousness of a born linguist, he was able to define that we use language to produce two strictly distinguishable kinds of utterances. On the one hand, we use language with the intention of making history. On the other hand, we speak with communicative intent and with the will to produce a discourse that can be shared by an “I” and a “you”. If all discourse is born of the “intention to influence the other in some way”, history, on the other hand, is always written in the aorist. With this name,

borrowed from classical Greek, Benveniste refers to a verb tense that does not admit either the first or the second person and also excludes any possibility of the present tense. In order to be perceived as “objective truth”, the story must be narrated in the third person, from a distance and without any kind of implication. Thus, the “facts” are placed in a causal chain “as they appear on the horizon of history”. The past is documented by the historian’s pen in a very selective way and always from the position of those who have the power to speak from the third person, to assume the position of an uninvolved observer. “If, as the primitive nature of its root indicates, the aorist is the oldest Greek verb tense, it is understandable that it is also the simplest. It only shows the action without describing it. To make visible other aspects such as the duration of an action or whether or not it has been carried out, other verb tenses have been developed”, writes Frank Stagg in 1972 in an article analysing the interpretative abuse that the Greek aorist has suffered in many biblical translations. Interpreters and translators of the Holy Scriptures have often been unable to resist the temptation to translate the archaic simplicity, that “oldest verb tense” and therefore also “the simplest”, with an intentionality that would already indicate the prophetic transformation of the world. Grau-Garriga, on the other hand, uses red as if he were an archaic artist, with the sensitivity of someone who neither judges the facts nor listens to oracles, but simply observes: “he shows the action without describing it”. His politically intense reds are a serene observation: there is always a desire for revolt. However, this undeniable fact never turns these monumental tapestries into a prophecy. Grau-Garriga, even when he speaks from historical intentionality, even when he expresses himself using the red of the aorist, leaves room for dialogue. He never assumes the position of those impassive chroniclers who do not admit any amendment. It is we, the ‘readers’ of these tapestries, who must decide what credibility we give to these proclamations, to this indestructible hope for transformation. Language, and all that it entails, our capacity for thought and communication, is not welded to the body, it is not a mysterious place inside the brain that is completely inaccessible to us and that we must blindly obey, but a product external to us, a “matter”. If language is “text”, then we can examine it, we can detach ourselves from inertias that haunt us at every turn as we speak and think and write. If we are aware of the materiality of language, we can use all the elements consciously, we can be active and committed “weavers” of what we say or leave written. “Red, bright red is that body”1

ACT ONE

I had to hurt you to make you realise. You were not growing in any particular direction and you were taking space from others. In trying to uproot you I discovered that you were a tree (though still small) with deep roots. And while I was wounding you, I wounded myself; I discovered your true dimensions, and the hole hurt. You were telling me about the house you are building with your partner. But your body was telling me other things. Bodies don’t lie; we know that. Now, you’ve come back to talk. You say you didn’t like it when I threw you out of me. It worked out fairly well for me. I had almost forgotten you. I thought about you from time to time. That you wouldn’t be happy. You didn’t look happy the other day when you came back – you who usually shine. Your hair looked less red. You looked tired. You were wearing funny socks. The last ones left in the sock drawer when there are no more clean ones left. You who are usually elegant. Now with the pandemic it’s all the same to us. It always makes me want to grab you when I see you. CADMIUM RED: Red is a surplus of life in the tapestry of life. Things that are red never lose their redness. It is a colour that appears beneath things when it is there. It is a potency. Red is the colour of Life, witness, as Kandinsky said, to an “immense and irresistible power”, of a male maturity essentially turned inwards.

ACT TWO

You tell me you don’t like games. Completing a game is not playing – I believe. Because there is always some kind of game, or at least there are rules: those of friendship and those of love, in this case. And you can play fair or you can play dirty. You play fair; that’s why I like you. That doesn’t mean that your game is fair. Your rules, which I had to accept. You beg me for us to meet another day. I think about it for two days and say yes. “I’d like to see you. Would you?” Yes, you would. You begged me, but I have this diplomacy, that of balancing power. Are you used to that? Neither you nor I like to lose control. Fifteen days go by. A fortnight that I climb. After climbing upwards (you’re back, you’re back and you care about me), I go down into the depths of my pink wound to open it again and add more of you. Once I had attained calm. You are vague in your proposal to meet and I realise: this is a trap. Okay, I’ll walk into your trap. I don’t know how to dress because I don’t know if this is “hello” or “goodbye”. The day we finally meet, you wait for me at the restaurant and offer me a fake smile I’ve never seen on you before. Yes, this is a trap. I came here because I’d rather see you and be hurt than not see you. We’ve both prepared arguments. RED: Red things must be of noble materials. If they are of poor quality they are usually vulgar. They make false promises, and therein lies the vulgarity, lack of honesty or substance. When a deeply red fruit tastes of nothing, the disappointment is all the greater.

Food, with you, has always been tasty. You gave me little time; you always had to leave.

ACT THREE

I can sense your impatience. You unleash: “I’m sure it’s not the first time you’ve blocked someone on Whatsapp.” “And what do you care?” I reply. You have your first argument. We circle around your wound: I cut off contact abruptly. I’ve apologised, and I had waited long enough for you. It still hurts you. I attend the theatre in which you play our break-up. I like you a lot. You end up telling me. Your gaze falters and I see a wound I would kiss and heal. Because I’ve liked you from day one. Yet not for a single night, but as a refuge, with an open, clear energy. For no reason at all. I would fill you until you float. I have so much to give. But right now I need the future that you are giving to someone else. Who knows, maybe we don’t agree? Perhaps I’d do the same if I were getting married: I would seek out the men I dream of and confront them one by one to know I have made the best decision. Is that how marriage works? I was imagining a clean path to a radiant “yes”, and now it turns out to be overgrown with doubts and brambles. We children of separated parents are the most romantic. Perhaps the love that founds families is beyond our reach. PURPLE Yellow plums don’t usually fail as badly as those that are reddish-purple. But when a plum is red inside and sweet inside, it is paradise. Someone said that there are paradises resembling the human body. I would have liked to explore it, your hair, chestnutred-purple ...

1 Cirlot, Victoria. Visión en rojo. Barcelona: Ed. Siruela, 2019. Una publicació en el marc de l’exposició Grau-Garriga: VERMELLS, un projecte d’Àlex Mitrani i Jordi Garrido. Al Centre Grau-Garriga d’Art Tèxtil Contemporani del 21 de novembre de 2020 al 10 d’octubre de 2021.

Disseny i producció: Ajuntament de Sant Cugat

Col·labora: Sorea; Departament de Cultura - Generalitat de Catalunya Coordinadors: Àlex Mitrani i Jordi Garrido

Documentació, arxiu i assessorament: Associació Grau-Garriga

Textos: © dels autors

Correcció i traducció: Poble Sec Books

Fotografies: Obres © Jordi Camí Sala d’exposicions i detalls de les obres © Eva Carasol Environament Vell estendard d’aquí © Agustín Ortíz Herrera

Impressió: Ediciones Gráficas Rey, S.L.