From the outer core to the inner core, exploring the functioning that keeps the whole together through the eyes of Joan Miro
A power to zoom out and zoom in at the same time
Exploring the abstraction of objects and their relation to the other objects is almost a reflection of scientific method, with which Joan Miro transported his inner world into the range of mediums that he used to express himself. Amidst brewing Europe both in terms of political instability and artists waking up each in their own interpretation of Surrealism, Dada, Abstract expressionism,… Miro was always loyal to the figurative shapes and rather than exploring the object itself in it’s complexity, he was stripping it down to the core and then explored the relation the object had towards other elements.
“The joy of achieving in a landscape a perfect comprehension of a blade of grass.. as beautiful as a tree or a mountain.. What most of all interests me is the calligraphy of the tiles on a roof or that of a tree scanned leaf by leaf, branch by branch.”
Miro
Merging with art as if it was alive and then freezing it in time
Joan Miro claimed that he felt physical pain when looking at the picture, at the world through his own system that perceived everything alive and being a part of a human.
He believed that everything has a life and that life is also part of the one perceiving it, in other world a total merging with the objects. Today through quantum mechanics we know that certain elements on a molecular level don’t exactly stay in place but in fact move all the time. Was Miro sensing and exploring this world even though his line of thought happened much earlier before these discoveries.
The whole concept of disconnecting and delineating the reality hold an attempt to focus on the object as frozen in time but at the same time communicating with all other elements as if they are merged.
For me an object is alive; this cigarette, this matchbox, contain a secret life much more intense than certain humans. I see a tree, I get a shock, as if it were something breathing, talking. A tree too is something human.
Joan Miro
With so much contradiction of both merging and fragmenting elements in the pieces no wonder that this is Miro’s opinion on Art critics: “They are more concerned with being philosophers than anything else. They form a preconceived opinion, then they look at the work of art. Painting merely serves as a cloak in which to wrap their emaciated philosophical systems.”
Even though originally his contemporary criticized his early style as being too traditional (due to the representational elements) he transformed his style after “The Farm” and went into the abstract correlation between the elements rather than distorting the elements themselves.
Bio – source wikipedia
Joan Miró i Ferrà (Catalan: [ʒuˈan miˈɾo]; 20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an “assassination of painting” in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
