A SOLAR PUNCH
MIRÓ AT TATE MODERN
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Today at Tate, before our eyes, we have this painting which has a particular magnetism.
Under the title “La Masía” from 1921-1922. It is presented with the crepuscule light
where day and night, heaven and earth, are all merging together. In the center of the
image we have a mysterious black spot, as the mouth of the earth, from where it grows a
great tree. I am among the many who believe this painting is the seed of the cosmos of
Joan Miró. Like this tree, his work has grown into a lot of branches in different directions,
forms of expression and media, with no expiration date. Something essential persists in
his work, emerged from a deep pi ctorial intuition and a latent poeti c impulse, which
manifests itself not only formally but above all through his distinctive balance, as a
reconci liation of opponents, an indefinable tension that reveals us a cosmic image with
a primordial look. The chaos is transformed into a new possibility and it is here at this
equilibrium where Miró gives us the secret of the reality of the appearances. The
irradiation of his pictorial and sculptural legacy annihilates all copies and usurpations
committed with his mirography (the expressive artist’s language, like his own calligraphy).
It is still a solar punch with the desire of provoking a physical sensation, to reach the
mood. "Art can die" – said Miró -"but what matters is that it has spread germs on earth".
It’s today when the space is a key dimension of our imaginary, that his weightless work
stimulates our avid gaze and suggests covering the flight of his nocturne enigmatic
characters, his ‘Via lactea’, the course of his stars… renewing the most fundamental
myth of human history which is the knowledge of our origin. I World only like to add a
commentary on the ressemblanceof the drawingof lanscape with horseof 1929, with
Miro’s ainting. I do not relieve it is a coincidence but rather an hommage.
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All this, is actually very far away from branding Miró as a childish naïve personality,
reducing his work to a chromatic and expressive feast, while his painting is actually a
freedom experience against any kind of imposed rhetoric and far away from any
resignation. He murdered painting as a reality simulacrum, nailing the dagger deeper to
reach the heart of the painting. The appearance of purity came after the bloom. Miró
walked through ‘the dark night’. In a letter to Picasso in 1925, he writes: ‘I prefer to stay
all life in the darkness and find a spark by the end of my existence, a pure ray of
sunshine…’ Transfigured Miró’s night, where no other dome but the firmament exists. The
horizons inhabited by Miró’s imaginary are not historical but perpetual landscapes.
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Like in a fiery spectacle of the universe, Joan Miró started his series of twenty-three
Constellations at the end of the 1930s decade: A group of small format temperas and
gouaches with a monumental appearance. Rain of eyes, sexual organs, diabolos,
and magneti c radiations of stars in a pi ctorial account of cosmology.
According to the painter himself, these works originated in the music and in the
reflections on the water, and were made in a time of great pessimism, when he gave up
all for lost on the eve of the nazi invasion in France and the francoist victory in Spain.
He was convinced that we would be banned from painting and could only draw on the
sand of the beach or trace figures with the smoke of a cigarette…<<When I painted the
Constellations I had the feeling of working underground, but at the same time it was a
liberation from the tragedy surrounding me>> said the artist. Miró painted these
nocturnal unusual constellations like a tragic and bright work. With the mironian outbreak
of his Constellations, the artist created a poetic and pictorial topography that beat in the
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20 century and yet in the present. There are no constellations, what there is in fact is
stars wandering by themselves…
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There is no distinction between painting and poetry in Miró. The titles of his paintings,
sometimes even handwritten in the same works, are not something trifling but on the
contrary, they offer us poetry tracks in the path of our contemplation. It is widely known
that appreciation of his own in one of his notebooks: <<Let my work be a poem scored
by a painter>>. Likewise, he celebrated poetry in memorable bibliophile editions, where
his collaboration as a painter rather than illustrate, managed to illuminate a select pool
of poets with his halo.
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Among them, there is Joan Brossa, the poet, who on more than one occasion
regretted Miró had not work in cinema as a means of creative expression, he thought,
reasonably that an animated film directed by the painter would have been an
extraordinary experience.
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It was soon in my teens when I had the chance to hear from Joan Miró by one of his
close friends, J.V. Foix, the poet. The first book that Miró illustrated was Gertrudis (1927)
with poetic prose by Foix. Some time later, the poet would write a beautiful text “Miró:
Pesebrista astral/Astral manger maker’.In those years, it was also revealing to me the
vision of The Dutch interior, Still-life with shoe, The blue sky gold, The fine bird that deciphers
the unknown to a couple of lovers and many other Miró’s works that were shown in the great
exhibition of the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu of Barcelona, in November 1968,
organized by the Town Hall and at the same time, in the surprising unoffic ial exhibition
that was presented with the title “ORIM: Miró otro” in the Col·legi d’Arquitectes head
office for which Miró painted an ephemeral and defiant mural on the glazed façade of
the building.
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photography F. Català Roca
Some time later, I had the opportunity to meet Joan Miró personally in Majorca during
an exhibition of my works, in which Miró was observing carefully in a calm only
interrupted by the question about the materials used or by an exclamation of
astonishment. We spent the day together having lunch seated in the shade of a big tree
among other friends. When we left the table Miró kept for himself a “pa de pages” (a sort
of country homebaked bread) with an open golden crust with the shape of a star. At the
end of that day, at the farewell moment, I announced him my impeding journey to
Mexico for a long period. He showed his interest towards that country he did not know but
would have liked to visit, though he did not feel up to do it, remarking the importance of
travelling and getting to know new cultures but with a deep-rooted perspective and the
eyes wide open.
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Some years after his death, I visited the Son Abrines workshop in Palma suburbs, where
Miró’s atmosphere is preserved by the objects selected by the artist’s eye and some
traditional craftwork pieces placed in different shelves that the artist called his own
“pinacoteca” (art gallery). Then I remembered a set of images captured by Francesc
Català-Roca, one of the few photographers, if not the only one, whom the painter
allowed freely to use his camera or to film the artist while working on his creations. These
were images of the same place I was, but then filled with paintings at the artists’ height
and now looking very soulless. When I was about to leave the workshop, I felt a sort of
happy shock when I saw the catalogue of my Mexican painting in Oxaca in 1978 on one
of the tables. Again I recalled when Català-Roca told about Miró: ‘he’s like a snail, there’s
no problem as long as you let it be, but as soon as you touch it he hides under the
shell…’ Untouched, Miró.
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This last image is one of the paintings from Oaxaca, at the end of the seventies. It is not
easy to show my work, or to comment on it, after the enlightened presented pieces shown
here of Miró. But far from every mimetic experience or mocking Miro, I feel his presence
as a poem with which you share a long dialogue and communication, that, of course,
goes far beyond words.
It is maybe the moment to show some other images from a retrospective exhibition
done in the Miró Foundation, in Barcelona in 1994 with work done mostly in New York
in the 1980’s.
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As you may know the spirit of the Miró Foundation is to remain an open and
contemporary space, and it was constructed by his friend the architect Josep Lluis Sert.
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I was telling you about the wonderful broad extension of Miro’s creative interests, As
many other artists of the avant-garde from the XXth century, the great legacy was to
experiment with the dissolution of the limits of one medium or another, its capac ity of
transmutation, for example on the stage. I will now show you a unique film which title is
Deu Dits (ten fingers). The image you see on screen is from a puppet-show called : “Morir
el Merma” (1977) of which Miró did the stage design and painted himself the characters.
Curiously the hands on my film are the starring hands you will see performing are the
ones from the same person in the image shown before. Teresa Calafell. The filming was
done in her own bed short before dying, and it is a special testimony of how two hands
can represent the universe. I must say today, it was more convenient for this presentation
to show you images in movement rather than painting, which fidelity on slides is always
doubtful.
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As in many archaic paintings on the caves, Miró uses the impression of his own hands,
even his footprints as a pi ctorical trace, collage of his own body. The canvas used as
a shroud. I will show one miute movie(2007) as my own self portrait
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This is black and white painting on paper done in 2007. It is not my desire to provoke an
overdose of Amat but I would like to finish my intervention with another micromovie
called “Carabanchel” it was filmed in a prison in Madrid today destroyed, because it was
a place of repression during Franco’s government. To me making a traveling, as a readymade piece of net, and drawing with the camera, merging again encounters and
memory, I World like to evokethe tryptich shown these days t the tate exhibition “Painting
on white background fro the cell of a Recluse”, from 1968.
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©FREDERIC AMAT, 25-06-2011