Gest de fam (Gesture of hunger)
The bipolar Cold War world relegated underdeveloped countries to a third place, in which poverty was the norm and hunger devoured entire populations. Antoni Miró’s concern for the helpless and the denounce of the injustices inflicted on them is the leitmotiv of his artistic output during the second half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s.
The criticism generated by the artist can be aimed at signifying a harsh situation that unveils a case of horror or inequality, or consist in an implicit protest behind a milder image. As Gamoneda said in the early 1970s, the artist “proposes a chronicle — and a critique — of the historical events shaping our lives: oppression (formal or structural), wars, betrayed revolutions, racial segregation”, but in other cases “the chronicle refers to subtler forms of the same oppression: alienating myths, the traps of technology, the misuse of human skills and so on.” The first kind of event undoubtedly applies to this painting. Here, a mother with his malnourished child in her arms begs for mercy. This is the grim, recurring consequence of war and domination. The appeal is made to the viewer, transcending the representation, with the painter demanding a response to redress a generic wrong rather than seeking to depict a reality.
In modern times, historiography has used many perspectives to exploit the scope given by the realistic approach. The representational canon collides with the terrible wrongs shaping our age, which establishes the need of a compromise to roundly denounce them and provide solutions, rather than just describing them, in a more or less evocative way, or ‘raising public awareness’. This is an example of the “necessary realism” that Contreras revealed in the work of Antoni Miró. This critic wrote at the time that “the realism that interests us cannot be considered as a pleasant alternative to reality but rather as a truthful image, because of its partiality, of this reality, encompassing negation and encouragement, accusations and proposals. To achieve this realism, one needs to sally forth on to the battlefield, to society, showing various aspects of the problem.”
Denouncing a distant situation is a token of our solidarity and, at the same time, helps us identify with other similar problems that are closer to home. The hunger suffered in other continents is no different from that found nearer by. The work both highlights known problems and warns us that they have to do with us.
Mother and child look in different directions, creating a special kind of tension, which conveys the stark helplessness of the child, wholly unaware of the eventual chances of mercy the mother might find in the person she is appealing to.
The way each character sees the situation is also conveyed by the use of different colours for each figure. The rawness of the mother’s pain is starkly limned in black and white, while garnet red is used for the child and for the background shades.
The scene fits into a painted frame but also transcends it. The painting is enlarged to the limits of the table, thus enhancing the dramatic nature of the scene, and — through being constrained — its gravity. The scene is framed by bands next to the edges and that are bounded by thin white lines. The four corners stand out with stronger tints.
As was common in the artist’s works at the time, the volume of the figures is achieved through a graded differentiation of coloured areas using flat inks of varying intensities. A texture is used to convey the appearance of the mother’s clothing, which manages to emulate its fabric.
Santiago Pastor Vila
