Personnage devant un paysage (Personage in Front of a Landscape)

Around the turn of the sixties, Joan Miró’s painting begins to be characterised by artistic expression that is intentionally essentialist and free. In Personnage devant un paysage (Personage in Front of a Landscape, 1963), the figure is defined by vigorous black strokes, while the landscape, connected with the cosmos, is identified by the use of colour. Miró perseveres with the characteristic themes of his later work – the figure and the landscape, which he also uses in his sculpture, designed in many cases to be installed outdoors. Subject matter which becomes unique through the use of personages that emerge from his abundant artistic imagination and that appear before the landscape and connect with the universe. The author Jacques Dupin seems to be describing works like this one when he writes that Miró’s paintings unfold a living space where beings and things come together, where encounters, changes, and metamorphoses occur, all typical of the mobile and transient place that is Earth. Personnage devant a paysage is painted on untreated paperboard, the same as a set of similar works from between 1959 and 1965; works that demonstrate the interest of the painter in the use of simpler art materials and in the expressive possibilities of a reduced graphical script.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio