Tête dans la nuit (Head in the Night)

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.
Tête dans la nuit (Head in the Night, 1968) is a sculpture in which, as in other cases, there are references to the idea of painting. It is a work with a vertical construction built by the assemblage of a tree trunk, the broken frame of a painting and other elements such as a hoop and a plate on which shapes are modelled to represent the face. The central role played by the frame in this work, which broadens and adds volume to the figure, intimates that the intention of the artist is to make an inescapable reference to painting as object, and also as a means of evoking sleep, the night or poetry. The empty frame, as an element of spatial projection, contrasts with the rough appearance of the sculpted face and the reference to the act of painting, which is evident in the dribbles that reveal the original patina of the sculpture.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio