Sobre la processó (About the procession)

Antoni Miró’s series “El Dòlar” is directed against Yankee imperialism. With his criticism, the artist denounces American warmongering and the neoliberal polices it tries to foist on other nations as the world’s leading economic power. Just after the Vietnam War, he created this mobile object-painting, which widens the scope of his reprobation towards militarism in general and the collaboration system that occurred in Spain during the Franco dictatorship between the army and traditional power structures such as the Catholic Church.

This work possesses key conceptual qualities that make it stand out from the rest of the series it belongs to. In it, the artist continues to do research on new techniques, such as airbrushing, and keeps on honing his communicative code, in this case focusing on a key element and straying from the creation of a complex scene or from the implementation of any kind of narrative line of interpretation.

War is represented very effectively in this object-painting. Miró achieves this by superimposing two elements which show their back side: an empty wooden frame and a frame with a canvas. The former is mounted on a wall and stays fixed, showing its wooden structure as a reference. The latter is mounted on the empty one so that it can be rotated. The four quarters of the top frame are painted in the same grey and olive-green hues over a predominantly white background with what seem to be several folds following the same direction. Each square bears an identical image of a soldier kneeling, holding a rifle. The kneeling solder is waiting for the Corpus Christi procession, presenting his arms. Each rifle points to the centre of the wooden cross-piece and follows the diagonal of each panel, forming a second cross.

Turning the top frame over the base adds to the warlike movement. The fact that the two structures are used as a visible support is not only a compositional device, but also suggests that there is an underlying critical-political and antireligious theme behind his works.

Santiago Pastor Vila