An Ecuadorian linked to Catalonia; he is considered one of the greatest representatives of Latin American painting. He moved to Barcelona in the mid-1950s thanks to a grant from his government and became part of the Catalan Informalist movement in which he took an active part between 1958 and 1962. Despite returning to his native country, he never left to be connected with Catalonia where he left family and friends. The exhibition presented by the Factoria Cultural de Terrassa shows about fifty works corresponding to the Latin American Collection as a result of the work of recent years. It was scheduled for 2020 to commemorate its 90th anniversary, but the pandemic did not allow it and now, without its presence, it becomes a warm tribute to one of the artists with one of the most unique and personal trajectories of the contemporary scene.
Tribute to Enrique Tábara. Latin American Collection
Curator: Joan Gil Gregorio
Terrassa Cultural Factory
Rambla d’Egara 240. Terrassa
Until March 20, 2022
An anxious researcher, Enrique Tábara’s name (Guayaquil, Ecuador, 1930-2021) is unquestionably linked to the sacred and the ancestral, the magical and the mythical, and his creations emerge from the link with the cultures that gave rise to the nation. Ecuadorian. The investigation of pre-Columbian art became a reference in his artistic development and this imprint marked a very peculiar work, of symbolic significance. The telluric roots were the basis of a chromatically intense painting, of repetitive signs in geometric arrangement, inspired by pre-Hispanic decorations. This iconographic repertoire connected with the Mayan and Inca arts, however, attuned to the international plastic movements of the twentieth century: from an expressionist beginning of a social nature, through a magical and surreal intentionality, following an informalist abstraction to to a marked constructivism.
In 1946 he entered the Guayaquil School of Fine Arts where he received an education influenced by atavistic American cultures and began a formal and thematic revolution. He moved to Barcelona (1955) on a scholarship from his government, where he became friends with the artists Miró, Josep M. de Sucre, Tàpies, Cuixart, Tharrats, Villèlia and Will Faber and the poet Joan Brossa. Likewise, the critics Moreno Galván, JE Cirlot, C. Areán, A. Cirici, J. Teixidor and Santos Torroella will judge his work and the gallery owner René Metras will present it on several occasions. Captivated by modern art, he became part of the Catalan Informalist movement with which he became involved as an active member. His stay in Catalonia (1955-1964) and his contact with Catalan creators exerted a change and influence on his work.
At this stage, the artist abandons the previous figuration, in which the elements of totemic connotations and vivid chromatisms are the protagonists, to give way to material surfaces of thick fillings and dazzling qualities. An admirer of Tàpies’ work, he combines new techniques with those learned in his previous period. He makes works of great textural interest, using matter as an essential element and experiments with sand, earth and other materials. This change does not prevent him, at a conceptual and formal level, from seeking a synthesis with his first formation, influenced by the structuring of Torres García and pre-Columbian calligraphy. It evolves into a more geometric language reminiscent of the aboriginal American elements of its origin. They are works of great force and resoundingness that seek their own reaffirmation.
He took part in the III Hispano-American Biennial of Art (1955) which was held in Barcelona where he got to know the work of the most important European artists. Of this period, it is necessary to emphasize the exhibitions that show in Catalonia and the national and international scope: Municipal Museum of Mataró (1956), Laietanes Galleries of Barcelona (1957), Barcelonès Athenaeum (1958), Gaspar Room – exhibition promoted by Club 49 -, Sala Neblí in Madrid, Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (1961) and exhibitions organized by the Kasper Gallery in Switzerland in various European cities. He was invited by André Breton to take part, together with Dalí, Miró and Granell, in the international exhibition on Surrealism (Paris, 1961). After the European tour, in 1964 he returned to his country continuing with the pre-Columbian theme, where in 1965 he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota. Enrique Tábara became a reference for Latin American avant-garde movements, and especially for Ecuadorians, creating in 1968 the group VAN (acronym for National Artistic Avant-Garde) together with Guillermo Muriel and Hugo Cifuentes, among others; a collective born to break with the indigenist rigidity and institutionalization that the aesthetic of social realism had imposed in those years in Ecuador, following the star of Oswaldo Guayasamín.
From the 70’s to the 80’s he travels through a pop echo vocabulary as he progresses towards the Pata Pata Series, in which he experiments with iconographic motifs of legs and feet, to which he later incorporates landscapes and insects, without departing from ancestrality. This suite took on a special role and the first of these works was done in New York in 1967. “I was tired of the pre-Columbian stage and abstraction. I wanted to get into a figuration. I drew a woman, but I broke it right away. That had already been done,” explains the artist. “Then I threw away the pieces of the drawing, but my legs stayed. I was surprised, I took these legs as a reference “. They are works structured according to the geometries of Aboriginal America, in which legs and feet, without moving away from schematism, tell us about time and space; works of minimalist and geometric echo of mythical resonances. Feet rooted to the ground or flying feet; enslaved feet or freed feet; bare feet or dressed feet; still feet or dancing feet pose a symbiosis between two civilizations. Like Tàpies, he is left with parts of the whole, with segments of the body to meditate on man and his relationship with the cosmos.
Curated by the historian and art critic Joan Gil Gregorio, the exhibition Tribute to Enrique Tábara. Col.lección Latinoamérica presented by the Factoria Cultural de Terrassa brings together a selection of the work produced between 2008 and 2019. The arrangement of the space-time coordinates modulates some works in which the construction of spaces and primitivist chromatism survive. Reminiscent of its historical style, figurative suggestions appear to materialize architectural areas and sequential rhythms, built with remains and fragments that take us back to a lost alphabet.