Sans titre

Executed just six years before his death, the present work by Joan Miró demonstrates the fullest development of his own personal style. Here, Miró balances playfully between the two most distant ends of the spectrum art has to offer, creating a work that is simultaneously figurative and abstract. Upon first glance, the brushstrokes droop, as though the paint has dripped downward in a freeform manner that intimates a sense of liberty from any preconceived plan. Miró presents a work almost directly from his own subconscious, hewn from loosely connected lines of pure colour, melding into a swirling image.

A plan emerges from that supposed chaos, however, as a face pours out of the liquid image to meet our gaze. Subtle hints inform the assembled visage in a way that forces us to question what we see. An eye circled in red, a mouth curled every so slightly into a smirk – the strokes seem at once accidental and gestural, but also intentional. Through squinted eyes, the composition could disappear, but thick black lines frame an undeniable human form. Such a careful contemplation of the boundary between real and imaginary, fixed and fluid, Sans titre shows Miró’s marked awareness of the themes that have come to define his career.

This portrait reflects a height of creation that is undeniably difficult to summit – a work that is both abstract and figurative, and in an equal sense neither one nor the other. Combining all the requisite elements of the human form and pure abstraction together to a measured degree, Miró pushes the boundaries of what art can accomplish by testing and tempering the limits of not only what paint can achieve, but what we as viewers can interpret.