A voracious reader, Antonio Saura always felt a special passion for collecting all types of images and papers as a source of inspiration to create his highly personal art. Images from the books he fragmented were then incorporated into his collages. However, for the new series he started in 1984 under the title Auto da fé, to which this piece belongs, he chose the actual book covers as the main object.

Saura saw the potential of these covers to become new supports for his painting. He was interested in their folds and torn textures. He claimed, “The tear of the glued paper or the adhered fabric creates in the ripped covers an extra stimulus, as if it were a prior and random intervention partially collaborating with its phantasmagoria.”

The work of this series is a by-product of destruction and of the gesture; a creative path that the artist began to develop after breaking away from the Surrealist movement and the result of violent, unpremeditated brushstrokes instilling into each one of his works a dynamic energy without beginning or end.

The expressive eyes and fragmented faces have great dramatic tension, partly owing to his succinct palette, limited to grey, brown and black tones. They constitute forms or anti-forms, seen as if isolated in space, in reciprocal interconnection on the right and left of the axis defined by the spine of a book which seems to be staring back at the spectator.

The works in Saura’s series Auto da fé strike us as a kind of commemorative monument that represents the indestructibility of art. That is what the artist himself explained in this writings, compiled in his Note Book (Memoria del tiempo): “It is a series of paintings made on the covers of dismembered books in which, due to reasons of varying kinds, their attractive and primary consistency was broken […] Originated in an inquisitorial destruction of manuals and treatises justified under the name of an all-powerful desire rather than censorship, it seems to me that the results belong both to a special chapter of critical commentary and to visual plastic thinking, being at once iconoclastic complacency and a rebirth from the ashes. Those faces looking at us and born out of a liquid and random technique speak, in any case, to a dual situation arising from the dream of reason.”