In the early '90s, shortly after inaugurating the foundation that bears his name, Antoni Tàpies created a set of works from the synthetic textiles that he used to cover and protect the floor in his studios in Campins and Barcelona. Tàpies recovered waste material and transformed old, scratched, ripped textiles covered in footprints and spatters, into suitable canvases to display, with varnish, collage and plastic paint, his own iconic repertoire. Driven by his interest in constantly searching for materials and techniques, he decided to work for the first time with these cloths for industrial use that are especially fragile, with irregularities and undulations; a foundation upon which he based a whole series of images, typical work spaces, which ended up marked like a manifesto or an artistic testament. In 1991, Manuel Borja-Villel, then director of the Tàpies Foundation, brought together around 20 of these works in the exhibition 'Profound certainty', with the idea of showing the artist's firm conviction with his art.
Now, 28 years later, the Foundation is showing this block of work in its entirety, including pieces that have not been exhibited before, and accompanying it with a series of bronze and chamotte clay sculptures from the same period. The result is a compilation that's like a road map you can use to travel through the work, touched by a certain melancholy with the artist's usual references to the passage of time, disease, pain and death.