Poet, professor and art critic Antoni Marí dies

Barcelona"Literary genres don't exist. For me, either there is literature or there isn't. We know what painting, architecture, sculpture, and music are—things change after John Cage—but it's not the same with literature. What is literature, and where do we find it? I can recognize it immediately: literature. I find it very evocative: literature. It excites me." Antoni Marí I used these words in 2012 to introduce Book of Absences (Tusquets), a magnificent example of the cultivated, demanding, and dazzling literary endeavor of the author born in Ibiza in 1944, who died in Barcelona at the age of 81. Shortly afterward, he added: "Literature is about fixing and dispelling the darkness."

Marí, who for years was a professor of art theory at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, ​​combined, from his debut in 1979 in Cream Notebooks with The prelude, literary expression in verse –as occurred in Some friends have come over (Tusquets, 2010)—and also in prose, outside of a narrative and philosophical approach—with books such as The silver cup (Editions 62, 1991) and The Vincennes road (Ediciones 62, 1995) – or essayistic –The expressive will (La Magrana, 1988)—and also with the skillful combination of memoirs, thought, and intellectual mystery that he presented in Book of Absences, his last contribution to the catalog of Tusquets, the publishing house for which he had directed the poetry collection New Sacred Texts –where he published authors such as Francisco Ferrer LerínChantal Maillard and Ida Vitale– and the Catalan one, who was called The Glass Eye

With a degree in philosophy and literature, Marí ended up specializing in the study of aesthetic ideas: in addition to his academic work – first at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and later at Pompeu Fabra University – he worked as an art critic for years with the supplement Culture/s of The VanguardHe dedicated books such as The conflict of appearances (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016) and collective volumes such as The Noucentista imagination (Ángulo, 2009). "A Book of Absences I'm talking about Schelling and the tradition linked to the experience of the sacred, which is always ineffable – he commented a few years ago. Sacred and profane are confused: what makes things sacred is the way you look at them.”

His most recent book, written after spending some time in the hospital, has been Four sides (LaBreu, 2025), a narrative poem divided into four parts in which the writer reviewed some decisive people and epiphanic moments in his life while writers such as Herman Melville, Josep Pla and JW Goethe, painters such as Kazimir Malevich and philosophers such as Friedof Fosfos infiltrated T.S. EliotWe can read: "Thought, in an instant, / can transport us to the most distant regions of the universe; / even beyond, to unlimited chaos, / where, they say, / nature is in total confusion. / There is nothing beyond the power of thought."