Lluita d'infants (Children's fight)
The “Black America” series forms part of the defence made by Antoni Miró of the underclass. This work denounces the marginalisation found in American suburbs, juvenile delinquency, and the battle against racism. Crime rose markedly in the US from the 1960s onwards. Lack of opportunities led to the alienation of children and young people, which in turn spurred greater street violence.
This picture strikes a stark balance between the two opposing key dimensions alluded to by Moreno Galván, namely the synthetic and the documentary natures of the work. The latter, which means “commitment”, turns both painter and viewer into “non-passive spectators of some real-life drama, for example being black in the USA”.
The scene shows a black boy who squares up to fight two boys standing with their backs to the viewer — both stare at him waiting for the fight to begin. One can imagine the shouts of encouragement. The violence is made all the more despicable by the fact that they are children.
The composition is sensibly square and its density is greater in the right half, which also includes colour. This contrasts with the left half of the picture, which is in black and white and represents one of the characters almost as a drawing. The whole work is bounded by two rotund side strips that focus the viewer’s attention on the attitude depicted.
Painted with acrylics on board, three representational approaches can be seen in this work. Tenuous vertical grey stripes cross the otherwise featureless light grey background. The foreground, consisting of fragments of children watching the protagonist, is resolved by superimposing, on the colour stains, a dotted texture that recalls the first perforated cards that were starting to be used in the textile industry of the time (Jacquard cards). Only the figure of the defiant little fighter is shown in a more realistic way, hinting at the floral print of his shirt and highlighting a silver ring that makes his fist stand out.
The modelling of the protagonist’s figure dispenses with any kind of linear borders and is achieved thanks to the orderly arrangement of coloured areas, with graduated hues. The protagonist is slightly offset to the right and looks towards his opposing side. The situation is heightened by the tension generated by the different visual weights of the two halves of the image.
A year after painting of the work, Eusebi Sempere penned some beautiful lines on the “Black America” series. It is worth citing them in full, given their relevance to this picture. “Antoni Miró’s paintings swiftly and directly convey their message, denouncing the ills of today’s society in a perennial way. This means his works, unlike the photo reports found in the press, do not get old in one day. He transposes aggressive, everyday images enhancing them with colours that distance them from real life, turning what was merely information into an artistic mutation. The technique used by Miró is that used today (as Léger or Lichtenstein taught us): flat, unmodified surfaces with tense contrasts in which black is predominantly used, a black as deep as the abyss, as our hopeless fate.”
Santiago Pastor Vila
