Personnage, oiseaux (Personage, Birds)

Part of Joan Miró’s painting during his final decade gradually gained in expressive intensity based on the strength of the stroke and freedom in the use of colour. Personnage, oiseaux (Personage, Birds, 1974) shows the classic theme of the human figure before birds in flight as a hybrid representation in which the gestural energy he developed after his last trip to the United States, in 1968, stands out. On a bright white background, Miró applied paint using different techniques and covered almost the entirety of the canvas with ochre, red and yellow hues. He used blurring and dripping techniques, together with outline figures consisting of black lines made using a broad brush to obtain an earthly vision brimming with a certain dramatic quality. The execution process revealed by the work shows a creative process, almost a trance, to which the artist referred during the same year this canvas was painted, noting: "What rules in me is the artistic and poetic; the associations of shapes and ideas: a shape gives me an idea, this idea gives me another and all together they lead to a personage, an animal, in a I-don’t-know-what that I hadn’t anticipated". Although in the case of Miró, improvisation, the unknown, and the fortuitous, always appear nuanced and sustained by the consistency of his original artistic universe, his themes, and his shapes.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio