Joan Miró. Mural Scrolls, 1948-1949

Palma de Mallorca,

Account Colm Toíbín, in The gaze captivatesthat both Joan Miró and Alexander Calder, before and after meeting each other, were interested in the relationships (of dramatic tension) between the mind that creates and the created object: they were aware of how pure colors affected the nervous system and the impact visual that the dreamed forms could provoke, those that spring from the deepest areas of consciousness. When both began their careers, under the involuntary impulse of the theories of Freud, Nietzsche or Jung, it was considered that colors and brushstrokes could hide as much as they revealed, that they had a symbolic force, and both authors considered that what happened when they closed their eyes He had a power of that kind.

Depths and surfaces ended up interesting them approximately equally and both understood that the tension that allows creation is situated halfway between poetry and geometry: their abstraction was a means and not an end; It was useful for a purpose, but it did not constitute a theme. Although the geometric shape was interesting in itself, it was only really worthwhile when it contained mystery and led to something else, not if it only harbored certainties. For more similar reasons, they focused more on the fickleness of energy than on stability, on radiance more than on the fixed image: the apparently simple, the external, had to serve to evoke the soul, the interiority; They ended up becoming interested in images that contained or released forms, and in these when they suggested dreams, internal rebellions, the repressed.

Furthermore, they also shared their tendency towards fluidity and intuition and a certain way of being when it came to diving into the imagination: they cultivated modesty and humor, lightness, and a peculiar sense of touch that they manifested, for example, in its treatment of blank surfaces or voids; They knew how to make their pieces breathe, combine chromatic fullness with austerity; They rejected their works being complex or dense solely to impress the viewer through that easy route. And for both of them the act of imagining did not imply limitations, but searches: in the case of the Spanish, related to dreams; in that of the American, with fragility and lightness.

It is also evident that both used playful elements – they were contrary to solemnity, to heavy rhetoric – and that they knew how to articulate a personal iconography, very recognizable, but which still seemed newly invented each time they created an image again. .

Calder and Miró met in 1928, in Paris, at a decisive stage in both of their careers, and they maintained contact and friendship ever since, consolidating a relationship that Joan Punyet Miró, the Catalan’s grandson, has described as mystical. A priori, their personalities diverged – the first was extroverted, very expressive; the second, shy and reserved – but, as we have seen, there was much more that united them: Calder’s mobiles have come to be described as Mironian abstractions in three dimensions.

That is the reason why the Pilar i Joan Miró Foundation in Palma de Mallorca has brought them together again in an exhibition, “Convidats”, open until next March in its Espai Cúbic: it has among its pieces two stable of the American, dated shortly after their meeting, in 1931, which point out characteristic features in his future creations, such as the search for balance and the management of weightlessness. At this stage, Calder’s production was moving towards abstraction and also opening to the third dimension, while Miró’s direction focused on spatial and formal explorations distant from his first figuration. In any case, both of them left aside to a certain extent the observation of the external as a starting point to undertake works that had to constitute universes in themselves, their specific referents being secondary or becoming dependent on the interiority of each one.

When Miró had just finished the twenty-three pieces that make up the set Constel.lacionswhich had begun in Varengeville-sur-Mer in 1940 (there he had met with Calder) to continue it between Mallorca and Mont-roig, the American carried out his own Constellationsin 1943 in Roxbury, Connecticut. It was only a matter of time before they both let themselves be carried away by the seduction of the celestial bodies, whose movements are apparently random to the lay observer but obey strict rules. At the Fundació we can see a selection of Constellations taken from the artist’s book published by André Breton in 1959, with reproductions in pochoir of the original Spanish gouaches.

Alexander Calder. Untitled, 1932. © 2024 Calder Foundation, New York

Another great opportunity for reunion was provided by Miró’s commissioning of a mural, at the end of the 1940s, for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, as the artist had to travel to the United States on successive occasions for this reason. , and Calder also designed one of his largest mobiles for that location; It was one of the first projects that allowed both of them to take their work to the street so that it could be seen by the widest possible number of people. Soon, in 1948-1949, another arrived: the mural Scrollsto which both of them also joined and of which Mironian evidence is collected in this exhibition.

In the following years the confluences between the two were almost constant: from the Fondation Maeght project, in which a long-awaited union between art and architecture could materialize, to the inauguration of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, ​​to which Calder donated his Mercury Fountain, evocative of their first moments shared in Paris and Barcelona, ​​of the Circus performances in Mont-roig, the ADLAN exhibitions and the Spanish Pavilion in Paris of 1937.

While Calder refined his compositions, which practically became signs in the air, Miró explored the voids and barely visible traces that the work of art has on the spaces it occupies and on those who see it; They studied the possibility, ultimately, that the entire world could be contained in one object. Parsimony in his case confers transcendent force.

Joan Miro. Mural Scrolls, 1948-1949

Calder & Miró. “Convidats”

PILAR I JOAN MIRÓ FOUNDATION

Saridakis Street, 29

Palma de Mallorca

From September 18, 2024 to March 30, 2025

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