Mir i Merigó

Antoni Miró has tackled nudes extensively throughout his career. At times, the sensuality of the bodies has been the vehicle for transmitting a certain idea, alien to the nature of the medium. In other instances, no additional concept has been superimposed on them and they have been recreated out of delight in their beauty. The recent “Nus i Nues” subseries mostly consists of works of the latter type. In some there is simply one man or one woman; in others two people appear. The couples are interacting sexually with each other and the artist is trying to represent this encounter. He seeks only to plunge into a properly human environment, far from any offensive desire.

In this large painting, on a scale much larger than real life, a fragment of an embrace seen from the side develops pictorially. The crossing arms are at the forefront and appear explicitly before us with a strong clarity, although one that is subtly modelled, thanks to his use of gradated illumination and his revealing the directions of the brushstrokes. One of the woman’s breasts approaches the foreground, but the rest of the bodies appear more darkly in the background. Thus, by contrasting these two levels of depth he manages to differentiate the degree of detail between two realities located, in truth, very close to each other. These strategies allow him to maintain the authenticity while focusing on certain select elements.

Santiago Pastor Vila