Blammm!

Josep-Vicent Marqués

Often when I look at a painting by Antoni Miró I have the impression that he denies us a certain satisfaction that o ne comes to expect, even when contemplating the pictorial illustrations of the established disorder. We tend to expect some deliberately blatant irony, a change in the not-always reducible code, a quote from his indisputable erudition or maybe some ruffianism that is more pointless than iconoclast. If it were not more of a non-pertinent rather than an impertinent sadism levelled at his audience, or a translation onto the canvas of awarning against falling in love, it might be viewed as a sort of protest against the inability of the art of painting to change things and a protest against the apparent omnipotence of a harmonious representation of something unharmonious: a protest arising from an intimate conviction that shoddy work is not revolutionary either.

My desire, I suppose forgivable, to bring his dissonance into line with my own, reminds me of the time when I was a boy in a kindergarten run by nuns. I was already advancing in my career by sitting closer and closer to the front of the classroom. One day, having chosen a desk located in a prestigious part of the classroom, I lifted the top of my desk and let it fall with a loud “blammm!”. The nun sent me to the back of the class to sit on a bench with no desks at all. I was back at square one. Some paintings by Antoni Miró have resounded in my ears like that loud “blammm!” of the desk top that I let fall out of a dark but intense conviction, generated either from arrogance or militancy, that you gain nothing by being at the top of the class.

(This article was written for the second time on the night of the exhibition in Madrid, on May 5th, 1992. It was not turned in earlier owing to my avowed modesty. I do so now, seven years later, with my warmest greetings.)