Policia a València (Police in València)

The 20th of February of 2012 marked the fourth day of what was dubbed ‘The Valencian Spring’. Students protested on that day against cuts in public education by the national and regional governments — both then run by Partido Popular. The police brutally charged and beat the student protesters.

The shocking footage and photos of this action of containment and submission were widely spread by the media. Miró uses one of these photos to denounce the lack of proportionality of this exercise of domination.

The work focuses on a concrete situation, isolating two figures and placing them in the scene in a specific way. These characters are set over a fragment of pavement that provides a certain depth. The upper background is a flat, scarlet area that encloses this depth. Through this approach of focusing on a concrete submission act and with the portrayal of the gestures of the two protagonists, the artist tries to convey something that affected many other demonstrators on that day, as we all know.

The figures fill most of the canvas, though some parts of their bodies lie outside the frame. In the lower half, the demonstrator lies on the pavement, his body horizontally aligned with a predominance of the light colours of his clothes. In the upper half and to the left of the canvas, a policeman immobilises the demonstrator, with the round dark blue mass of his uniform clearly defined.

In addition to the arrangement of the bodies, the expressions on their faces focus tension towards the left-hand edge of the composition. The blood the young man spits after being struck further accentuates this asymmetry. This skewed composition is ironically offset by placing a blue-wrapped boiled sweet on the ground, in the bottom half to the right.

Santiago Pastor Vila