Antoni Taulé

Antoni Taulé (born 1945) is a Spanish painter, architect, and performer.

A street artist during the sixties, his art has been labelled as part of hyperrealism and a representative of the “new figurative” movement.

He paints classical empty buildings and interiors: ballrooms, office receptions, halls of the Louvre museum, chambers of the Prado, the Palace of Versailles, monumental spaces that fuse reality and fiction under a fleeting atmosphere of light.

"The building is actually just like a person. It has a heart, lungs, a nervous system, intestines, and eyes ... I am fascinated with what one can see, with the reason why does one look at it or avoid looking, and how one reflects upon what he sees. In one word my work is about how a man functions."

His unique creative universe mixes scientific and mathematical concepts and a passion for art from the past, Italian, Dutch and Spanish old masters, especially Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya.

From 1982 onwards, Antoni Taulé has created set designs, largely springing from development in his own painting, for some of the great opera and theatre, including Washington Square, Henry James's novel, adapted by Rudolf Nureyev, Enfance and Pour un oui, pour un non (For No Good Reason) by Nathalie Sarraute, or Francis Poulenc and his Dialogues of the Carmelites adapted from a play by Georges Bernanos.

It has inspired numbers of writers and critics, like Jean-Christophe Bailly or Julio Cortázar who, fascinated by Taulé's rooms and tables, wrote the story “Fin de etapa”, in Deshoras, a book published in 1983.