Dolmen, 1980

“I thought that in my time everything was being held together by threads, that there was no solid structure, that everything was fleeting and the sense of eternity had disappeared. And I concluded that the most profound way I had to explain my time was out of fragility.” In the 1960s, Antoni Llena had already positioned himself in favour of art that was extremely humble and ephemeral. He did this with actions featuring the body, as minimal and transitory as the artist’s sweat stuck onto tissue paper, or with work done with paper, folded and cut into various shapes. In this way, using no other materials, he sought to create bodies with volume, or worked with the light and shadows of a folded piece of paper. His exhibition Exhibition of Nothing, presented in 1969 at the Petite Galerie of the Alliance Française in Lleida, would be emblematic. His work was always typified by the idea of fragility, while also featuring a sharply defined poetics of the object, as with this paper construction that refers, with an irony of its own, to the power of a dolmen.