And the mirós arrived home. With the announcement that the collection of the ex-BPN would definitely get in the House of Serralves, the president of the chamber of the Port closed the saga of the 80′s and many of the paintings of Catalan artist that are since Friday in this modernist building that fits so well to the work of Miró. Could have been here always, since the house was a dwelling place surrounded by the beautiful gardens also drawing geometrizante, very "art deco", as well to the taste of the educated classes of the european time. Is that the collection that now we see starts exactly at this time.
The architecture of the exhibition, such as the director, Suzanne Cotter, had said a few weeks ago, thought of the building as a jewelry box, a wrapper that could take full advantage of the collection. Both Álvaro Siza, who has worked in the architectural space, as Robert Lofthouse Messeri, the curator, chose a mounting that does not prioritizes the temporal succession of works, but one that highlighted different features of the work of Miró as a whole, seen from this collection. The interest for the experimentation of different materials is, as noted by Messeri, the very heart of the work of Miró, the thing that allows you to serve the metamorphosis of everything, exactly the central concept of all his work. In these parts, this interest in the matter is present, and as soon as you enter, in the grand lobby that gives access simultaneously to the rooms of the ground floor and the main stairs. Here we find "assemblages" with a screen of burlap (the "sobreteixins" that the collection has multiple copies), works on paper, on cardboard, on paper the road, realised by a variety of techniques impressive. In the text of the book, Messeri cites no fewer than 14 kinds of different techniques, from collage to the decal, the ink-china ink, enamel, which are in pieces now displayed.
Joan Miró: the materiality and metamorphosis, the name given to the exposure, highlights this essential part of the technique to the service of the ultimate objective of the work of art. To understand, to enter in the main room of the ground floor, which presents a set of works that exemplify very well the process of definition of the language of the painter. Miró belonged to a golden generation of Spanish art. It was only twelve years younger than Picasso, and passed away in 1983, ten years after him. Like Picasso and Dalí, he settled in Paris, where he had the atelier to the side of Masson – that sought to capture the chance in your paint with sand thrown on glue, a technique that we find reminiscences in the work of Miró. He worked with the cubist, but it was the Surrealism that he encountered the brothers of course. André Breton, for example, he said that he had a electricity of mind," which led him to create. We do not believe this to be a strange assertion, since it agrees with the designer that we guess behind the fever of experimentation.
The Dancer, 1924, to the style of other masterpieces of the same period, such as the Head of a peasant Catalan, is certainly one of the first works in which Miró fixed alphabet plastic that will be your. Carefully, carefully, we realize the arabesque of the legs, one eye, the hair, the breasts. It is as if Miró, already here, he needed to build again the shape of the beings of the world to know the painter. The woman, of course, but also the bird, the cloud, and the stars – has a series of beautiful Constellations made during the war – are the themes of his work, the beings and elements that structure the universe that is his. The titles, as here, often acquire a connotation poetic, very different from the explanations in excess of Dali, another surrealist Spanish. in The singing of the birds in the Fall, the work chosen for image exposure, is one of those titles, and who responds in the darkness and in the formal economy – only, we distinguish the wings of the birds, the white of the bodies, the eyes and the blue of the sky, as if the whole way biased to the dissolution in the movement’s ephemeral – the a another, very well known, belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of New York, titled This is the color of my dreams. Displays only a blue spot and the word "photo".
Still in this room, other works, among which the one-piece horizontal, decline this alphabet formal until almost the last years represented in the collection. The first floor opens with one of the best paintings in the collection, the work Women and Birds, and is complete with two rooms of works on paper, some of high quality, such as the drawings of La grande chaumière, 1937, and the collages with the material litografado, also these years. The collection , moreover, is rich in works from the 30′s, precisely the one in which the painter began to work with Pierre Matisse, the first owner of the collection.
This path of deconstruction and reconstruction-formal never slips, just as is the case with the work of Picasso, the abstraction is pure. Some of the drawings present in the exhibition seem to contradict this claim, but a close observation also allows us to detect in them the slightest sign of the star, in the eye of the bird, the sex of the woman. This is a collection that will live well, in the sense that all collections should live, showing side-by-side with their international counterparts, whether in Barcelona, the Miró Foundation in Palma, Mallorca, New York or in another city any. There, complete with the works that Miró created, and that are not in the Port, especially the sculptures in ceramic and the engraving. And here, in Porto, will fulfill the same function that it has in Spain, which is to enrich the cultural offer outside of the political center that is Madrid.
so, one of the big news of the day of the inauguration was that a loan of five or six paintings had already been requested for an exhibition in Barcelona in 2021. This is the best answer we can give to those who did not want the collection in Portugal. And don’t even have to be us, the Portuguese, and to give it. The art speaks for itself.