Les Trois Noirs 1976

Antoni Tàpies made 'Les Trois Noirs' with a deceptive simplicity that gets under my skin. There's a vertical blush of pinkish tan that anchors three floating black shapes, almost like a deconstructed totem. The materiality here is everything, right? Tàpies has this way of making nothing look like something profound. That stroke of color isn’t just there; it’s scrubbed and stained into the surface, a record of movement. The black shapes are sharply defined against this hazy ground, little disruptions that pull your eye around the frame. I love the ragged edges like each one tore itself from the mass. Think about the space between those shapes, the quiet tension. It’s like a conversation with missing words, a poem with gaps. And that's how it connects with other works by artists like Alberto Burri who were interested in process. Art is always about this dialogue, this openness to what might happen.