Signs and writings

Codes and systems of symbols have been commonly used throughout the course of history to organise individual senses and facilitate their collective comprehension. From the birth of writing to the current makeup of alphabets there has been a slow evolutionary process of different writing systems to represent concepts: from pictograms and ideograms, logograms, syllabic signs and letters to the written or spoken word, the writing system was created to decode ideas and aid human communication.

Signs and writings was designed to create a thought-provoking space on the role of signs and writing in the plastic arts in the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition takes a look at these symbolic applications as a structure for thought and subsequent aesthetic expression.

All the works in this exhibition form part of the Suñol Soler Collection and were created between 1972 and the present day. The forty-two pieces chosen here reveal the recurring use of signs and writing in painting, collage and tapestry as a visual reading of the artists’ need to communicate.

Works by Robert Llimós, Antoni Tàpies and Zush offer us a certain vision of the creative process and the manifestation of a unique, unseen language, together with artists such as Ignasi Aballí, Darío Villalba, Carlos Pazos and Joan Rabascall, whose pieces contain more explicit narratives. All these works use signs, the alphabet or writing as structural components of composition. And this unanimous interest might well be the result of a specific sensibility in the second half of the 20th century, a time when the study of language permeated all fields of knowledge.