Joan Miró and the script of things
By Charlotte Stace
One of Joan Miró’s wishes was to free Western art from the mimetic depiction of reality and to restore it with the sacred character it had had at the dawn of civilization. This led him to eliminate pictorial devices such as scale, perspective and chiaroscuro from his work, and instead, give drawing a pre-eminent role. That being said, it wasn’t until the Spanish Civil War that he established a language of signs and symbols of his own that would distinguish him from other artists of the 20th century.
Based on a selection of works from the collection at the Fundació Joan Miró, this new exhibition shows the evolution in Miró’s language, from the crystallisation of the sign and its representation as an ideogram, to the creation of large figures of mythical appearance, the result of the individualisation and enlargement of his own symbols.