Miró in 性、命

Jul 12, 2008 14:09

"Could it be that we do not know how to verbalize the unbounded liberty of signs that animates the universe?

"When I am working," he told Dora Vallier many years later, "I go into ecstasy.  My painting overflows.  I start a drawing and end up doing ten or fifteen!  One leads to another; or rather, each drawing comes out of the precedent one!"  In order to achieve this spontaneous proliferation, he had to free himself from the laws of gravity, from the heavy apparatus of representation, by ridding himself of his obsession with his native territory: had he not taken the plunge and accepted the risk of poverty, Miró would never have become Miró.  He had to experience the state of weightlessness one discovers in drifting and isolation, to suffer from hunger and even hunger-induced hallucinations (Miró always refused to ask his parents for money to survive on).  The first inevitable consequences of Miró's move to Paris were a loss of self-confidence, self-doubts, and groping experimentation from one picture to the next between 1918 and 1923, five years of overly sober and prudent painting.  He was walking a tightrope and struggling to keep his balance.  He needed these five years to cut the umbilical cord attaching him to the investigations and experiences that were his as an adolescent, and to get rid of the classical subjects: landscapes, portraits, still lifes, pipes, newspapers, pedestal tables!  Like a balloon released into the air, his painting suddenly soared in 1923.  The accumulation found in the realistic canvases gave way to empty space, where it remained for him to invent what he called "the trajectory of mind over an entire lifetime, not what one has done during it, but what it gives a glimpse of and will allow others to do in the near or distant future..."  Painting suddenly became an energetic exercise, an expenditure.  It ceased to be a reflection of self and became a zooming arrow - ever more arrows shot at random into the night.

Jouffroy, Alain.  Miró.  tr. Clark, Charles Lynn.  New York, 1987.  p.48-49

性命, cultivation and practice, hardship, effort and enlightenment, ascesis, 道教

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