Joan Miró
The Miró! Dream and color - in Bologna at Palazzo Albergati until September 17 - wants to tell the artistic code of the Catalan genius: an exhaustive review of his work that left an unmistakable mark in the European avant-garde.
Joan Miró's last creative season is in some ways the most transgressive and unconventional one in which his contemplative soul is flanked by a unique poetic, suspended between dream and color. A combination to still escape banality and conventions, giving life to a universal but at the same time original and inimitable artistic language. The extraordinary inventive power of these fruitful years is at the center of the current exhibition at Palazzo Albergati in Bologna.
The works on display, over 130 including a hundred large paintings, all from the Pilar i Joan Miró Foundation in Mallorca, belong to the Catalan master's production of the last thirty years. Although among the least known, they are perhaps those that tell the most in depth about the artist who comes to terms with the past, revises the techniques, becomes in some way even more anarchist and experimenter.
«I consider my studio as a vegetable garden, and I am a gardener or a winemaker, wrote Miró. The key to the exhibition is the Balearic island, with its bright colors, the sea that brings wind, voices, and a necessary freedom. Mallorca is the hub of his inspiration. His maternal grandparents lived here and Miró spent his summer holidays here. He was 8 years old when he already painted with his own aesthetic. The relationship with the island was consolidated in 1929, when he married Pilar, a native of the place. He then returned there on various occasions until he settled there permanently in 1956, at the age of 63, in the height of fame.
The island offers him the privilege of working in the silence of unspoiled nature, between poetry and popular art. This is where twenty years of feverish activity and intense aesthetic adventure are concentrated, always open to innovation and technical experimentation: in the splendid studio designed for him by the architect Josep Lluís Sert and in the "buen retiro" of Son Boter, Miró will create more than one third of his artistic production.
The exhibition itinerary of the Bolognese review, chronological and thematic at the same time, presents the artist's favorite themes such as women, birds and the landscape: works inspired by the rural world and the cult of origins, the themes of sexuality and fertility, to those linked to metamorphosis, the afterlife and the eternal succession of life and death. Attention is also dedicated to the works of recent years made with the fingers, spreading the color with the hands, spreading the dough on cardboard and plywood and again to the sculptures that are the result of experiments made with different materials, in the wake of a never subsided desire to recover an original, almost artisanal dexterity.
The significant starting point of Miró's poetics is represented by a vision made of sinuous lines, by an organic representation of natural elements and scenes of common life, to progressively move towards a simplification that reaches lyrical abstractionism, to his personal surrealism made of light lines, flat color backgrounds on homogeneous backgrounds, shapes devoid of volume, fantastic, of rare expressive suggestion.
The artist elaborates a new and very original language of calligraphic imprint: the sign thins, assuming an eminently graphic character, the background becomes a rarefied space in which harmonious thread-like, light elements hover, a magical, transparent, dreamlike universe of marked symbolism hallucinatory.
Throughout his life he works between this metaphysical need for abstraction and a never forgotten love for matter, following his research towards the tactile aspect of the work, dating back to its primitive formation.
Precisely the carnal and sensual relationship with the material, the instinctual link with his land and the comparison with the models of the primitive artistic tradition, not only in Spain, are the elements that Miró overcomes, without forgetting them, in his fantastic surrealism steeped in lyricism because, he affirms , “It is necessary to overcome the plastic data to reach poetry” and enter the fairy-tale world where desire and reality meet and identify each other.
And this is the key to understanding paintings such as Femme au clair de lune (1966) or Femme dans la rue (1973), extraordinary works that revolve around the mystery of existence and nature, pervaded by powerful energetic principles that determine their incessant becoming, in which the meaning of life is placed.
Mirò relies on bright colors, violent reds and intense blues, the geometries of a complex ego in close connection with the surrounding world. His fascination with poetry and popular art, rock painting and primitive cultures is evident. Powerful is also the reference to Antoni Gaudí, in the fragmentation of the image and in the use of colors that seem to be an expression of Catalonia.
The intimate journey into the universe of Mirò continues by highlighting his relationship with American abstract painting, with oriental aesthetics and philosophy. Everywhere a careful observer, self-critic and experimenter Miro appears, who draws with his fists by intervening on the canvas, who collects and transposes into the poetic dimension postcards, stones, shells, newspaper clippings on which he paints his visions, which reduces the iconographic motifs to give star shape, bare female lines, phallic figures, hybrid characters between man and birds, with eyes and heads.
A sort of compendium of his poetic path suspended between the charm of the past and the continuous aspiration of the future, where the myth merges with the pictorial gesture to give life to the seduction of the timeless art of Joan Miró.
