Composició De Carn (Meat Composition)

During the experimental phase that is included within the latter part of the “Opera Prima” series, Antoni Miró created several works that explored different artistic languages and pictorial techniques. This painting is a clear example of this. The artist, with a remarkable density of materials and a highly predominant intense red colouration, expressively portrays naked bodies. We can see a woman with a child alongside other figures, which could be a man or a woman with two children. Their physicality is referred to directly as if they were raw meat, and it is not presented as beauty but as suffering, which is increasingly being experienced by innocent people in the world every day.

The composition refers to the idea of corporeality on two levels. On the one hand, it does so directly in the seated characters that form the scene, which occupy practically the entire painting. In them, an explicit voluptuousness is immediately noticeable, further accentuated by the framing of the figures by tracing their outlines with a continuous black line, delimiting regions that are only slightly different from the background. On the other hand, the use of different textures, from smooth areas to tangles of impregnated paint threads, giving a relief that sharpens the material and natural components.

The lighting effect provided by circles tending towards yellow is also significant, especially the one at the centre of the image. The centrifugal stresses induced by the silhouettes, with their upper trunks and heads inclined towards the upper corners, also refer to an obvious diagonality.

Santiago Pastor Vila