Painting before the Mystery. Tur Costa in the 60s and 70s.
A review of Rafael Tur Costa’s work from the 1960s and 1970s, curated by Helena López Pezzi, artistic director of the space. A wonderful opportunity to enjoy the early Tur Costa. This selection is a bold proposal, because it covers what is perhaps the least known period of the artist, an Ibizan pioneer of abstract painting, yet it is the period that places Tur Costa in the Spanish avant-garde and, with him, Ibizan painting in the handbooks of Spanish contemporary art.
His best known and most admired work belongs to his last period, marked by the distinctive duality of his creative universe, which the 2007 catalogue gathered under the idea of “mystery”: “Mystery, then, suspended between the spread of white and the patch of colour, claiming its place between the edges of the wound, like an insistent presence.” Fabregat, author of that text, humbly notes that more authoritative voices have helped to define the contours of this play of contrasts, referring to Areán, Arnán, Cirici, Corominas, Rodríguez-Branchard, Giralt Miracle, Marí, Valero and others; Tur Costa’s bibliography includes the most distinguished voices in the historiography of contemporary art.
(…) Before the fissures, the tears and the breaks, before the space opened up to mystery, there was a full Tur Costa, the one shown in this exhibition. Let us be surprised and captivated by these periods in which silver bursts in with overwhelming power and the graphic marks spread out into a calligraphy that is both ancestral and current, Ibizan and international, as only Tur Costa could express it.
Nuria del Río Pinto