Joan Miró's artistic and mysterious constellations at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Returning to Joan Miró (Barcelona, ​​1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983) is always a pleasant and surprising event given the uniqueness of his artistic legacy. An ironic man who knew how to shape his mystical introspection and at a critical distance from the world and events. The landscape, like Miró's creative constellations, never stops transforming. We discovered this again in the suggestive sample Joan Miró. Absolute reality. Paris, 1920-1945curated by Enrique Juncosa at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

The proposal focuses on the period of from his first trip to Paris in 1920 until 1945 when he lived in Mallorca, where a few years earlier he had fled the war in France. It was precisely between 1940 and 1941 that he gave shape to his relevant series of 23 constellations. From 1945 onwards, he created works with a white background that consolidated his language of floating signs on ambiguous and enigmatic backgrounds.

It is known that Miró's heteroclitic poetic and visual cosmos carries the figure of a creative intuition that seems naive – which weighs as a reductionist attribution in some receptions of his work – and which, however, traces a free and thoughtful inquiry that connects its dreamlike, instinctive universe with reminiscences of the rural, the universal anthropological and other art histories.

stopped writing for the magazine Cahiers d'Art in 1939: “If we do not try to discover the religious essence, or the magical meaning of things, we will only add new causes of degradation to those that already surround people today.” For all these reasons, his work is untimely.

The montage is organized by periods that distinguish creative openings and processes in different contexts. The first section shows works from 1918-1920 created in Barcelona. At that time, this city was home to prominent figures of the first avant-garde, such as Francis Picabia, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Marcel Duchamp, whom Miró met. Some self-portraits, landscapes and drawings of leaves and plants from the time still carry a realistic impression which he will transform from his stay in Paris, where he comes into contact with the poetic and artistic scene of surrealism.

Constellation in a very free form, between formal innovations related to some modern avant-gardes and mainly to surrealism and dadaism

It was in 1926 and 1927 when, in his new Parisian studio, frequented by his neighbors arp jeansRené Magritte and Max Ernst, paints a series of works Landscape (Landscape with rooster) It is Landscape (The Hare), both from 1927, which already announce a visual stylization and a universe of signs that renew their formal choices. Such landscapes break with naturalism and affirm the emblems of the new imaginary reality which is established in his painting with greater emphasis in his later work.

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From that same year there are two other small paintings on a white background, such as To paint (The sun) any Painting (The Star)where recognizable and stylized forms of stars and animals float as signs of this new surreal reality. Miró perseveres in drawing that dialogues with informal stains and acquires an unprecedented role as an introspective, sovereign and substantive action that hybridizes it with other plastic and textual resources.

Another section exposes production in the convulsive 1930s. Works such as Group of characters in the forest (1931); the calls wild paintings (1934-1938); and a set of paintings on masonite that represent monstrous figures in ambiguous and disturbing spaces, whose allusion to the Civil War cannot be avoided. It incorporates materials and textures that add new expressive densities valued as pioneers in action painting.

The series will come later constellations (1940-1941) whose first performance was in New York in 1945. In it, he superimposes black lines and fields of color, with materials also rich in textures such as tar, gravel or sand; scratch or puncture the surface, revealing recognizable shapes such as eyes, heads, and phalluses. Other compositions from 1945 show characters, nocturnal birds and signs such as affirmation of vitality in the context of war.

In Miró, as reflected in this magnificent exhibition, the coexistence of words, figures and visual forms overlap in enigmatic compositions that activate unprecedented openings of meaning. He presents a diversity of visual, textual and expressive registers that shape his imaginary work in conflict with dreams and the world.

Constellation in a very free form, between formal innovations linked to some modern avant-gardes and mainly to surrealism and dadaism; but its singularity makes it refractory to a normative inscription in any current of art. Beyond the dispute between figuration and abstraction, they show the traces of their imaginary creation, with irony like the one he defines in his self portrait (1937-1938) and self-portrait II (1938). Or in his stoneware and earthenware pieces, where the everyday becomes intimate with the surreal.

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