Mirò, a quiet surreality

An ordinary gray suit, jacket, tie, flawless haircut with the side parting. Punctual and methodical in his work, he went to his studio in the morning until the evening, working continuously and with rigor.

From Monday to Saturday. Sunday is a day off to spend with his wife and daughter.

Anyone who could notice him might think he was a sacristan or a modest accountant and instead it was a matter of Joan Mirò i Ferrà, painter, born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893 by Miquel Miró Adzerias, goldsmith and watchmaker, and Dolores Ferrà of Oromi.

Shy, of few words, reserved, very kind and affable. He spoke of himself with extreme modesty, even when his paintings were selling for millions of euros. (his record about 30 million euros for a single painting).

So as not to leave a consolidated artistic biographical tradition, his father directed him to commercial studies, but, even with the meekness that belonged to him, Joan proved that he had nothing to do with commerce. Drawing and painting was his vocation.

There was a quiz in which you win by matching the character of a person to his paintings, with Mirò we would lose.

Who would ever say, looking at those paintings so full of life and color, so free and pyrotechnic, out of every rule and school, do they correspond to such a taciturn and, ultimately, sad person?

At art school he has Francesc Galì as his teacher who practices it in a way that is truly curious for a painter: paint blindfolded recognizing objects with your hands.

If you deny a painter to portray the images of the external world, all that remains is to paint the internal images.

Beyond formative bizarre, Mirò, step by step, transforms his painting inspired by Van Gogh, De Vlaminck and the Fauves towards Matisse, Juan Gris and surrealism. But even more: towards Miro ... towards himself. His style is unmistakable.

From a painting to large brush strokes, substantially expressionist, in 1919 he switched to a very detailed style, from miniaturist specifying even the smallest detail, albeit of fantasy.

Already appreciated, his fame began. TO Hemingway liked Mirò and bought one of his paintings for the wife.

He knows and frequents all the major painters, from Picasso to all the others, the surrealist poets like Prévert, the Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and as he absorbs ideas, he creates canvases that are increasingly personal and distant from any possible representation of reality.

In his works appear fantastic animals, celestial objects, asterisks, commas, mixed animal-human beings, a kind of new alphabet that he will use throughout his life. Intense his participation in exhibitions, events, theatrical works. He also produces ceramics and sculptures always with his unmistakable style.

In short, his is poetry, his is music made using painting. Painting made with a hundred materials, collages, and everything that the imagination offered him.

A fantasy that allowed him to compose even poems like this:

“A red carnation shines

on top of an umbrella

carried by a hake

with a parrot's tail

lying on the pink snow "

André Breton considered him "the most surrealist of us all" and Prévert describes him as follows: "An innocent man with a smile on his face strolling through the garden of his dreams"

The key to reading to understand his works, if such works are ever "understood", he gives it himself:

“More than the painting itself matters what it emanates and spreads. If it gets destroyed it doesn't matter. Art may die, but what matters is that it sowed seeds on the earth "

This is what can be hidden in the soul of an absolutely ordinary man like Juan Miro i Ferrà.