The magic box

Sol Ferri

Painting, sculpture, installation; everything that form is part of what we call art, has something that removes us from the daily routine, transmits something that moves our spirit, that vent us. That’s why we could think art is a part of a certain kind of the daily magic. That magic that surrounds us every day and only a few people are able to perceive and enjoy. I would like to realize all the magic things that I know are certainly happening at this precise moment. That is the reason I have thought of Antoni Miró like a magician.

This magician has a box where he keeps all the realities, all the lies, everything that is happening in the story he is living. The whole world inside a box. A universe of his own where images, icons, bicycles with thousands of forms, naked and suggestive women, alive excavators, nature, the human being as a part of this nature...

From time to time, that box opens and Antoni takes out an image; he keeps looking at it again and again, he thinks for a moment and it becomes a picture: he has done magic.

This painter does magic since his works talk to us, are alive. His pictures are opened windows to lean out and contemplate life. In fact, art —painting— is the way of communication that Antoni uses, it is the best way to express himself and in which he feels more comfortable. The language his images speak is universal, everybody understands it, it is not necessary to study it, you only need to contemplate it. Somebody calls it visual poetry, others call it social realism and even denunciation art.

It is true, he transmits us a denunciation message. He plays the role of transmitting and watches the present. Nothing escapes his eyes, they cannot be deceived. Antoni removes the masks which hide us reality, the disguises and the wrapping in which reality is sold to us many times. He uses his weapons: humour and irony to transform the allowed vision, to move the most ordinary elements and objects from their place and order and insert them in a new place, a new context which gives them the real meaning.

Miró is a rebel person and his revolt breaks all the pre-established orders so as to live, see and be as he likes. The magician is a compromised artist, that makes a compromised art tied to a compromised way of being and live, and totally honest with all that surrounds him.

In addition, his pictures and his sculptures caress our feelings, exalt our ideas and please our sight, because it is really true that Antoni does not believe in any free ethics art, in content or intention, he neither believes in the art free of aesthetics, forms and beauty. The other facet, apart from the communicative one, is his artisanal facet which figurative control of the drawing technique, its vibrant range of colours, its brave powerful composition.

His paintings go closer to the photographic reality; the colours and composition are alive. Because it is a lively art made by a person who lives with all the consequences, who drinks life and transfers it to the canvas in order to transmit us his message, which tells us that we must be on alert and watch our environment, the people surrounding us, what it is happening now.

Miró’s art has an own style easy to recognise in any place, at any time. During the journey that means the artistic investigation and the different stages he has gone through, the painter has kept his style and personality; this fact shows that he has a significant coherence within a constant evolutionary line.

Miró tells us to wake up, to watch and above all he invites us to think, to talk to his paintings and enjoy ourselves, in conclusion, he presents us to the life. One life in a world which goes around too fasts, too much rational and sad world sometimes. We work, eat, run, get stressed and get depressed, we have no time to enjoy, to living. The magic Antoni Miró creates, consists exactly in which his art offer us this time to stop the speedy wheel of life. Time to watch, to think, to live.