Personnage (Personage)

Between 1928 and 1934 Joan Miró approaches the techniques of collage and building objects as a means of anti-pictorial rebellion against the traditional concepts of art. In his final period, from the sixties onwards, he aims to create a series of works that preserve his traditional and fascinating attraction to objects, yet the clear desire to build a corpus of sculptures leads him to the use of one of the most ancient techniques from this discipline: casting. The Museo Reina Sofía’s collection of Miró sculptures, consisting of 43 works dating from 1967 to 1981, responds to this criterion. They are works that arise from a great variety of always humble objects, and that after a long process of definition in which he prepared a multitude of drawings and sketches, was completed with the casting and the patinating of the bronze in the Parellada workshop in Barcelona. The originality of Personnage (Personage, 1981) lies in the imposing presence of this sculpture, created from the casting of a shape produced by a folded piece of cloth. The various graphic, symbolic and line elements that Miró includes in the work seem to define it as a female figure carrying a staff in an ironic personification of power. Statements by the artist such as: "Mocking my personages. Mocking man, that puppet which cannot be taken seriously"; or referring to the interpretation of his work: "My painting can be considered humorous and cheerful even if it is tragic", provide an idea of the background, only seemingly contradictory, of works like this one in which irony and radical inventiveness prevail.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio