Painting as poetic strategy of contrast

Julia Otxoa

It is satisfactory to find in this time of invertebrate “postmodern” thought, a lucid creator who understands culture, not in a narcissistic manner, lamentably in fashion, but from the romantic, utopian and necessary standpoint, knowingly immersed in the multitude; dragged along as Benedetti would say. Assumptions which unite aesthetics and ethics, so much present, in an indissoluble union, in all the artistic trajectory of Antoni Miró.

To pass to the other side of the mirror like Antoni Miró, an retrace the daily reality of evened out certainties through the cloudy liquid of obscure toothed birds, where all smell originals in the fact that everything is sleeping or lying down, as previously determined, only requires the living pulse of imagination, of sensibility which observes, infiltrates and translates, revealing other faces than mist peopled with acute non-existence.

Like a transgressing eye which invades the territory of a historically everyday iconography, and reveals it to us with a new significance, which gallops from denunciation to the demythologised irony. Starting from this overwhelming environment of images with which the Mass Media supply us, he extrapolates objects to incite the perceiving eye to be worried, to provoke in the spectator the sensation of another reality different from that which shows us the immovable semantics of an unquestioning, unreflecting, uncritical way of thinking.

Meninas, Picasso, the Count-duke, Innocent X or The Duchess of Alba, are shown as realities out of context, suddenly introduced in a strange manner, almost always uncomfortable, uprooted from the aesthetic coordinates, those that were created also find themselves naked, strange and ill-at-else with it sees. This painter, as a hide-and-seek and smiling alchemist, achieves his objective: to stimulate aesthetic perception, multiplying to infinity the interpretations of the symbols which make up our cultural surroundings.

It is the poetry of a gaze which is directed towards matter in lineal, frontal form, soon to rebound backwards, but penetrates, encircles, delves, cuts, recomposes images from morphology which undermine the acceptance, pursuing obsessively the investigation of intrigues, the revision of references, the questioning of dates and lines of influence. To achieve the agility of an uncatchable acrobat, on the back of a thought which is known to be alive through being unfinished.

Antoni Miró in this series “Pinteu Pintura” (Painting Painting) presents us in convincing form his aesthetic proposal, languages decoder, including the historical language of painting itself, from the furious fear of message and receiver, to a new formal relationship which advocates wider and more extensive oxygenated spaces for communication.

The poetic strategy of the contrast as a platform from which Antoni Miró shows us the constant kaleidoscope of the scheme of our cultural baggage; it is an challenge to look in another less unilateral and monolithic way at the huge swarm of facts which we carry, which isolate us from ourselves and from others; in a word, it is a challenge through satire, irony, denunciation and love, to change the old and stale clothes of the multiplicity of immovable symbols.

Inscribed in the trend of critical realism, Antoni Miró remains in a constant experimental anxiety, as in shown in the diversity of routes of his aesthetic language: graphic art, painting, object-painting, sculpture, etc.

In a playful exercise, Antoni Miró proposes and disturbs the packaging to obtain meanings which are transparent but human, so we can pass, like Alice, through to the other side of the looking-glass and understand.