Rafael Tous Fonds

The extensive body of work donated to MACBA in 2020 by Rafael Tous is the most comprehensive collection in this country of Conceptual artistic practices. Before the nation established any institutions dedicated to contemporary art, and few people fully understood the implications of certain emerging, artistic trends, Rafael Tous not only grasped the meaning but bet on it. Over a period of fifty years, he assembled a collection that included around thirty now fully-established artists and more than a thousand works, which, thanks to his generosity, are today part of the MACBA Collection.

PASSIONATE COLLECTOR

A passionate collector who was linked to the textile world, Rafael Tous (Barcelona, 1940) developed an eye for Conceptual art, with its diverse practices that nevertheless prioritise the idea and process over the object. Acting intuitively, and without regard for market speculation, Tous built a collection that helps define the attitudes and experimental work carried out by a group of artists, many of whom became friends and were supported by him on their artistic journey.

An Art of Action

Blow, trace, observe, run… Action was one of the most broadly employed artistic expressions of the 1970s. As it was materially ephemeral and set apart from all traditional artistic disciplines, action united everything the new generation of artists sought to put into circulation. Amongst the variety of forms that were adopted, there was a kind of action art associated with nature that awakened a great deal of interest amongst artists, whether exploring body movement in space and the perception of physical phenomena, interacting directly with the landscape or registering tensions and documenting similitudes. Some artists developed complex, theatrical actions, frequently putting themselves into situations of risk.

The Alchemy of the Elements

The artists who had a relationship to landscape and nature included them as frameworks of action, or else converted them into experimental working tools. Water, earth, air and fire were no longer just artistic supports, but also became art’s primary materials and explorative fields. This alchemical art approached the natural environment and its transformations, processes and energies, giving rise to a plural variety of practices. Amongst the various proposals of the time, what stands out was work exploring closeness with all living things, the rejection of all forms of animal abuse and commitment to the notion of healing.

New Social Behaviors

In the 1970s, the mass media became a new domain of artistic exploration. Its eruption into the collective imagination, along with rising consumerism and the popularisation of the world of the image, were factors favouring its interest. This resulted in an art that was critical and denunciative; it was often sociological in nature, visibilising multiple forms of manipulation in advanced capitalism. Many artists were interested in the mass media and its images, which they altered and intervened in to deploy personal mythologies or reveal the newfound commodification of the gaze. Using resources such as literalness, irony, play and subversion, they decried the deficits and errors of ascendant consumer society.

Stalingrad, Guernica, Dresden, Auschwitz…

The political, denunciative gaze, set in opposition to the many forms of 20th century totalitarianism, has an ongoing presence in the art of the 1970s. The first generation of Catalan conceptual artists was distinguished by its powerful opposition to the Franco regime, which also played out in other parts of Spain. The weakness of the regime made it possible for determined inroads to be made by the revolutionary spirit of France’s May’68, Marxist theory and a way of understanding art as a tool for social transformation. In this context, extremely radical political propositions were set forth, along with others that critiqued social malaise. Discrimination against women, the first elections, the televised treatment of Franco’s death, along with the memory of fascism and excess militarisation centred many of the artistic propositions of the time.

The Life of Words

The emergence of concept art in Catalonia occurred in parallel to the experimentation with language that was seen in other areas of the avant-garde. In the 1970s, the visual poetry that had been developed in pioneering fashion in the European post-war became more broadly known, along with the philosophy of language and semiotic theory. The theses of theoreticians like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure and Marshall McLuhan opened up a new paradigm, which was also explored by art. Interest in all things related to the word, the equivocal relationship between language and things, the semantic dimension of the object, the idea of play associated with phonetics, as well as patterns of repetition—these were just some of the areas that would be developed.

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Poetic of the Objects

The life of objects and the proliferation of consumer goods centred the attention of experimental practices of the time, which explored their many facets on formal, poetic and discursive levels. Everyday objects and those of an extremely humble nature, decontextualised and intervened on in a multitude of ways, took the place of the work of art. When referring to Catalan artists working this way, we find unique propositions such as the “enfangades” [muddying], the inclusion of reliquaries and impossible objects, a taste for kitsch and an accentuated aesthetic of poverty

For a Critical Art

In the 1980s and 1990s, social and political engagement continued to be present in many artistic practices. The denouncement of all forms of violence, war and the collapse of dialogue, as well as forms of social abuse carried out worldwide, centred the interest of many artists whose careers were already consolidated. In this mode of working, Francesc Torres used media images and objects from the consumption society to deactivate ideological codes that are not always explicit. Working from an artistic position, the artist encouraged collective thought of an effectively critical character, evidencing irrefutable parallelisms, as in his “Siegesallee o Avinguda de la Victòria” [Siegesallee, or Victory Avenue], or when intervening in the pages of well-known magazines like the historical “Newsweek”.

Sala Metrònom

To create a space dedicated to contemporary art, Rafael Tous opened Sala Metrònom in Barcelona. First located on Carrer Berlinès, in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood, and later moved to Carrer Fusina, adjacent to El Born market, was operational between 1980 and 2006. Metrònom organised over a thousand exhibitions and activities that had a decisive impact on the evolution of the culture of those decades, not only in the visual arts, but also in the fields of the performing arts, music and comics. The experimental profile of most projects, outside the institutional and commercial circuits, made Metrònom a meeting point for the unexpected and transgressive. Photography, technological art, performance and contemporary music had a prominent place in its programming. Metrònom was a forerunner in the creation of an archive, not only of its own activity, but also of some key documents for the understanding of the recent history of art, in dialogue with an extensive bibliographic and videographic collection that includes thousands of titles.

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