“I was really scared when I saw the model. That had never been done. my wife said that They would put us in jail & rdquor ;. The author of the sentence is Isidor Prenafeta. And he exclaimed when Eduardo Arranz-Bravo and Rafael Bartolozzi they taught him the artistic project designed for the factory that was about to be built in Parets del Vallès: a 2,000 square meter mural that covered the whole ship, the whole. Pop colors and psychedelic design. It was something that had never been done before. It was, and is, the famous tipel factory, icon of Catalan pop art from the 70s and visible, a lot, for 50 years from the AP-7 motorway. Anyone who has passed by has seen it, as it did on April 2, 1971, shortly after finishing the mural, an inspector from the regime Francoist.
No one ended up behind bars but the diligent official filed a complaint that urged “immediate withdrawal & rdquor; since, in his opinion, the piece by Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi affected “traffic safety & rdquor; being “a kind of modernist painting & rdquor; too “bright and flashy & rdquor ;. The Ministry of Public Works accepted Tipel’s resources and the complaint did not go further, there was a pardon, but it did filled pages and pages in the press, National and international. In these parts, it was requested that if the factory was a distraction, that they also cover up other monuments likely to attract the attention of drivers, such as the Montserrat mountain or the Arc de Barà. In the rest of the world, from Italy to South Africa, the mess was not understood and the intervention in the ship was defended for what it was, an artistic work.
unpublished photos
‘The Tipel factory: the painted dream’ speaks of all this, exhibition at the Arranz-Bravo Foundation (until May 1), book (of Carlos Toribio) and research on the how and why of that mural, now cataloged as a Cultural Asset of Local Interest (BCIL). Among the discoveries are 80 unknown slides that document the work process of the duo of creators, from the fall of 1970 to March 1971, and that it is intuited could have the signature of Xavier Miserachs. Why? Due to the type of snapshots and because the photographer documented another session of the creation of Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi and the images that accompanied the press of the time were his.
The one from Toribio and Albert Mercade, co-curator of the exhibition, it is the first major investigation on the subject, and has allowed many things to be discovered but, according to Mercadé, it could and should be expanded: “Nobody has ever been interested in this intervention, we have done it ourselves, but this should be a starting point for further work of some artists who were very important at that time but whose career is not explained in any museum & rdquor ;. Certain. Too contemporary for the MNAC and too pictorial for the Macba, much more interested in conceptual art.
eight lambs
But the piece is worth it: “It is one of the most important works of art of that time, It was not only the largest mural in Europe, but it was also countercultural and psychedelic”, points out Mercadé, who recalls that from those years of conceptual and ephemeral art what have remained are, above all, images that document the actions –of the ‘happenings ‘gastronomical works by Antoni Miralda to the skinned ox by Jordi Benito- which were carried out but not the works themselves. The Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi thing in the Tipel was pure and hard painting. Or “total work of art”, Mercadé points out, not in vain was the industrial warehouse decorated while it was being built and creative madness of Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi also reached the windows, which protrude from the facade; and the machinery, trucks and soccer team jersey of the fabric.
The entrance was also intervened, they stood in front of it eight lamb sculptures of which three have been recovered in the hands of a Parets veterinarian, the rest were lost. It happened in the 90s when the factory closed and the building, paintings included, went into great decline. It was that way until the new owner, Peter Hernandez, he saw in the mural a value to maintain and he sent it restore in 2019. A rehabilitation that will continue in a projected walkway above the slope that separates the factory from the highway to be able to contemplate the work, as if it were a Outdoor museum. The platform does not have a budget or calendar, but it does sign: the design leaves the studio RCR Architects, winners of the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel Prize for architecture, in 2017.
Color explosion
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Although the origin of everything dates back to the 70s. When Prenafeta decided to expand the family leather warehouse business in Poblenou and create a leather tanning factory, Tipel, in Parets del Vallès. But the businessman was not only an entrepreneur, he was also a frustrated artist, who had studied side by side at the School of Fine Arts with Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi. The idea of the mural came from a trip to the USA and the fascination with the first ‘graffiti’ that began to fill the walls of Harlem and Soho, and for the choice of artists he had no doubts. The result is the aforementioned mural, the son of the spirit of 1968, which is defined as pop but which, however, has little more than pop colors, “it is closer to psychedelia”, says Mercadé. The intention of the artists, she affirms, was “to put life in a place of torture & rdquor; and that his great prize was to see how on weekends the workers returned “to the place of torture & rdquor ;, that is, the factory, to show it to their relatives.
The truth is that it was a explosion of color in the gray Spain still under Franco, and a popularity that surpassed the artists. After the Tipel they made other interventions, such as the house of Camilo José Cela in Mallorca and the façade of the Barcelona International Photography Center (CIFB) in Raval, and their works sold like hotcakes. Half a century of that will be fulfilled in 2021, but the pandemic has delayed the exhibition and the book until now.