Toni Llena: The Practice of Dispossession by Luis Pérez Oramas
(Translated by Christopher Winks)
Modern physics – its quantum theory of loops – teaches us that time is – if it is something resembling what we imagine it to be – a thermodynamic reality, an improbable and limited concept, the name we confer on our inability to see the complex web of interactions that, following improbable rules, make up reality: the frozen past, that which occurs in place of the improbable passage of heat from a cold to a warm body, reality as occurrence, the granular texture of what happens, whose synchrony is, or may not be, sudden and absolute.
Because a different past is born at every moment of the elastic future, it could be argued that Toni Llena’s work has, among others and like any other, various moments of origin, at least two originary scenes. I recall one of them in the following manner, as narrated by the protagonist: the founding professors of Eina, Barcelona’s legendary school of art and design convened to celebrate those beginnings with some personal interventions. Toni Llena had planned a performance with a discreet play of mirrors placed on the exterior of the building with its large glass windows, so that at a certain moment the sun would cause a prodigious refraction – reflections and prisms – at the place of that meeting.
But that day there was only rain, and Toni Llena was there facing the indifference of nature, ancient and beautiful as Alberto Caeiro would say, without light or words. The critic Cirici Pellicer – if memory serves – intervened with merciless rigor, excusing all excuse and declaring that what makes an artist is precisely his capacity to respond to the failure of resources: “A creator needs no excuses,” he said. So Llena, to everyone’s perplexity, mute before the world, slowly began to strip, until he was as we all were on that first day, as St. Francis of Assisi counseled his friars – that saint to whom the youthful Llenas, not yet an artist, had devoted his hours, works, and days.
That there was no sun, that the mirrors remained mute of light, that there was no reflection, that only Llena’s nude body attempted to supplant the absence of all brilliance, resembles the experience, at once ordinary and disturbing, of not being able to find the word we seek, of having the word at the tip of our tongue.
Pascal Quignard has written some moving words about this: “Language is always a terrifying struggle between night and silence. Language is the primitive scene on fire. It is the struggle that seeks the orgasmic death that satiates, in the end, organic death. That is the reason why re-encountering the word we seek presents features resembling, including in women’s faces, the catastrophic flowering of male ejaculation. […] Curiously, once born, once beings-of-language (humans) have passed into language, language is the only neogenesis for life, on the condition that it fall short.”[1]
When language absents itself, when expression mourns itself, when we remain mute and motionless, when we do not encounter our name (like Narcissus who does not encounter his face), when in life we step into those swamps that anticipate death, when the word sinks into an oblivion which is really its submergence into what was before, when there was no word, when the sun did not come out and mirrors, opaque and grey, lost their meaning, when we remain at the edge of the word that remains at the edge, we are also – without knowing precisely when – at the imminence of its return, its cathartic effraction, like an ejaculation, like a new birth.
On that day, Toni Llena, stripping himself, was born again.
Those were hard times, a tyrant ruled, and the young artist’s innocent nudity caused tremors: he was forced to stop teaching for a time to prevent the dictatorship from closing the school. But from that point as well, Toni Llena dedicated himself to the practice of mute things – as Nicolas Poussin called the art that the visible brings us – adding an unceasing errand into vanishing, towards the labors of disappearance.
There is in his work, then, a theology of vanishing, atheist or negative: a Franciscan aesthetic of dispossession, of seeking to be nothing, with its consequent glorification of what we insistently disdain: the remains and ruins of the day, the precarious paper held in a hand as if it were an archangel’s fallen wing, stockinged feet against the floor, and the paper which absorbs a semen stain on the belly – ultimately, the sumptuous glory of the fragility that can be in all things: being nothing in order to become everything, as a verse by Murilo Mendes states.
I have the great good fortune of being able, whenever I wish, to go toward Toni Llena’s drawings: I keep with me an infinite month of happiness summed up in sketches where the most vertical light, made into a mere wisp and an elaborate dispossession, flowers brutally against my face. I therefore wish to speak of the residue: what remains.
Et in Arcadia Ego.
I recall that work from 1995, with its folded blanket, spotless and white like the transparency of childhood, a blanket with which Toni Llena caressed the face of his mother for the last time and which then, under the title of the painting of Arcadian shepherds, he used to make a beautiful, precarious, moving monument to her memory, a sculpture which has, not by chance, the naked shape of the female sex that brings us into the world: the origin of the world. I therefore think of the three nights – of uterus, sleep, and death – and of the three dreams from which we emerge, because this work has made me understand how much blind night fills men’s breasts.
I never tire of seeing in it dispossession writ large, monuments clothed in anti-monumental vestments – winter journeys, shepherds of the primal garden, the never-ending whiteness of the batrachians that existed before the world, and all the enclosed gardens yet to be named. Better still, as in those desiccated sculptures in which the art of the concept, infinitely more subtle than a mere game of phrases, and immensely richer than all of tautology’s circular ruins, echoes in their modest, transparent receptacles the phrase of an artist of the same stuff as Llena – Luciano Fabro -- because like our Catalan maestro he exercises the same sacrificial care with his practices: “I represent the exaltation of the object in the vanity of ideology.”
This is evident: there are unknown, monumental artists because in them ideology is rendered vain, and progress a phantom with broken wings. Toni Llena is one of these: writer, a polemicist of brutal sincerity and absolute sensitivity, a mute poet, with words on the tip of his tongue, an aoidos of bricolage who breathes into the little things he assembles in his structures the grandeur of Tarquinia and Arcadia. Perhaps the most organic and sincere conceptual artist there could be, because, avoiding the reduction of art to the abyss of language, he had the modest sincerity to make only about twenty objects, a handful of castoffs, barely a hiatus, and then remain in his own creative silence for many years. It is important to point out that Llena has not converted this passage through the astonished terrain of kenosis into a self-interested system, nor has he made of non-art a skirmish for personal standing or the trade in artworks, i.e., a factory of nothing. His sculptures, desiccated, continue to be bodies. In them, as in all the radical gestures Llena invented in Catalonia around 1967, there is an unprecedented version of conceptual art, a spiritual rigor directed towards the complex condition of those discrete ruins, those traces of things: in order to exhibit them as secular reliquaries that act as a manifesto against all aesthetic exceptionalism.
I shall now say that those of us are indeed fortunate who have come to know Toni Llena, his docta ignorancia and hermetic knowledge of small, disconnected, abandoned minutiae that our artist has newly put together with the genial patience of interminable bricolages.
I have accustomed myself to the idea that Toni Llena only works with what has been left over. Left over from language when it stumbles. Left over from the sun when it falls silent. And I can imagine him every morning, on that monastic table that also serves as a remnant, scratching Gracianically his precarious papers: they accumulate there like the days, and like the days they pile up, densities that unbeknownst to us provide us a measure of what has passed: not time but what occurs, where things remain as well, in the immeasurable.
Against the monumental fallacy of dematerialization, this body of work is made, then, of what remains, but it is made corporeally in order to speak in the mute language of an animal image to those no longer here, or to those who have yet to arrive. With this ambition, which has forever been art’s, and which a great deal of contemporary art seems to have abandoned, it enwraps us – also – like a maternal blanket.
But there is more. Because at every moment of the elastic past is engendered a future might be, which remains latent as a possible coming-into-being or not, in that state which José Lezama Lima celebrated as a fold of existence – again: not of time but of that which occurs – even more relevant that that which is or is not, Toni Llena’s work found, before being, before Llena even coming to be the artist we know, another moment of origin.
This originary scene which has not ceased to unfold in the form of a work of stripping down took place in a Franciscan convent where, as we have hinted, Toni Llena entered in his tender adolescence, leaving his friend Toni Bernad waiting in a sculpture garden. There is a touching photo taken by Bernad’s sister – Bernad is a great Catalan photographer and Llena’s life partner – of that morning when the friends separated for many years, so that Llena could pass through that ascetic territory, or through that other figure of the desert we call a convent.
One day during those difficult years, the community of Catalan artists and intellectuals came to organize against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and the Superior of the convent gave them room for their deliberations, in the knowledge that the Concordat’s protections made it impossible, if not improbable, for them to lose their freedom for meeting. As was to be expected, the forces of order surrounded the convent, and everyone was obliged to spend the night in the company of friars and novices.
It fell to the novice Llena to receive in his cell and offer a place to sleep to two Catalan artists who would come to play decisive roles in 20th-century Spanish art, and no less so in Toni Llena’s life: Antoni Tapiés and Albert Ràfols-Casamada. Tapiés looked with perplexed admiration at the tiny sculptures made of scrap materials that succumbed to the devastating force of his breath, and since then both would form a lasting friendship. Ràfols, more silent, more of a poet, may well just have looked at those sculptural riddles, and would later invite this novice to join the professorial staff of the Enia school upon its foundation.
Few artists can pride themselves, like Toni Llena, on embodying continuity in the difference of the great Catalan tempest of modern art: Fortuny, Dalí, Miró, Tapiés, Brossa, Ràfols find a home in his work in order to be deformed, to be multiplied by differentiating themselves into the strategies of his humble and prodigious figural alchemy. I have sometimes thought that just as Alexander Calder made Miró three-dimensional, in some of his best assemblages Toni Llena makes three-dimensional anti-monuments steeped in Ràfols-Casamada’s visual grammar: the same asymmetrical glory, the same praise of precarious equilibrium, of the figures that founder because it is precisely there, in the splendor of their poverty, their quasi-no-longer-being, that they are being born.
Paul Celan omitted from his famous Meridian a passage in which we may also encounter a propitious covering, and a sublime explanation for this aporia of genesis and continuity: “In its auto-sublation [the poem] sees its – perhaps only – chance. […] In this in-between, the space of its becoming free, its being set free and floating free, in statu nascendi thus and simultaneously also in statu moriendi, lies the ground of the poem. This groundlessness the poem [and I would like to say here: Toni Llena’s work] takes as its ground.”[2] This is its foundation and where the flowering of his modest grandeurs does not cease.
[1] Pascal Quignard, “Petit traité sur Méduse,” in Le nom sur le bout de la langue (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), 75-83.
[2] Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version – Drafts – Materials, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011), 60.
Antoni Llena (Barcelona, 1942) is a painter, writer and sculptor known for his arte povera style work. Llena was a novice in Sarrià until 1966, following the Capuchin Franciscan Order. Soon after, he became close with painters Antoni Tàpies and Albert Ràfols-Casamada. He also befriended other artists like Jordi Galí, Àngel Jové, Silvia Gubern and Alberto Porta with whom he collaborated on the first piece of video art made in Spain called Primera muerte (1969). His first solo show was at the Petite Galerie de Lleida, Catalonia in 1969, an exhibition where he drew on gallery walls and featured paper and shadow sculptures. 1969 was a turbulent year for Llena that was marked by the loss of many of his works, resulting in him vowing to take a 10-year break from art in the name of poetic radicalism. Following his return to art making, his work has also been shown at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (1989, 2010); Artgrafic, Barcelona (1991); Centre Cultural La Mercè, Girona (2003); Galeria Toni Tàpies (1997, 1999, 2001, 2006) and Galería A34, Barcelona (2012, 2015, 2018). Llena's works are held in the collections of Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His sculptures have also been installed in multiple public spaces across Barcelona. He was a professor at Universitat de Gerona in Catalonia where he taught artistic literature. He has also hosted workshops for the School of Visual Arts in New York and the EINA School of Art and Design in Barcelona. The artist lives and works in Barcelona.