Juliet

This work is part of the “Suite Havana” sub-series, inspired by the beauty of Caribbean women’s bodies. The painting is imbued with a direct, warm eroticism. Antoni Miró sometimes produces images that combine a voluptuous naturalness with other traits that indicate some kind of rawness. This painting is a case in point.

The model is reclining and the composition is framed to show just her torso, leaving out her head, one arm, and most of her legs. The body’s silhouette appears on an ochre field whose rough texture was created using bronze filings. The skin colour of this half-caste woman is illuminated in a contrasted way. The chiaroscuro reveals the geometries of the corporeal volumes. The breasts and belly are shown in all their turgor thanks to this. The same happens with the arm and hand: the gradating shades of brown are the ones conveying shape, not the drawing of their contours.

The composition is longitudinally set along a horizontal axis, with the bits the artist wants to highlight being placed in the centre of the composition. The scar from a caesarean section and the navel are placed between the breasts, on one side, and the pubis and hand, on the other. A thread runs from the woman’s navel to this aforementioned horizontal guideline. The thread might be taken as the trace of yet another operation, but instead it seems to metaphorically refer to the idea of the continuity of life.

Santiago Pastor Vila