Femme en transe par la fuite des étoiles filantes (Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars)

Femme en transe par la fuite des étoiles filantes (Woman Entranced by the Escape of Shooting Stars, 1969) is an intense painting based on the use of flat colour on a white background. It deals with one of the most expressive themes in Miró’s universe, that which refers to the poetic and spatial connections between the human world, connected to reality, and the stars, as a metaphor for poetry and escape. The female figure symbolises the mythical connection of man with his roots in the land, which locates the human being in this world and the place he occupies in it. It is a fluid black spot, rhythmically defined by the experienced hand of the painter and from it emerge appendices, gesticulating arms formally associated with hair, which together with the star and the curved line suggest flight or stellar motion. This work also contains a special connotation relative to the variety in Joan Miró’s modes of working with pictorial material, which permits a review of the development of his paintings since the fifties. By using the dripping technique, it alludes to Action Painting, having included on the bottom left of the canvas a dribble of black paint. At the same time, he seems to refer to another trend in abstraction, Colour Field or painting fields of colours, based on the expressive significance of flat colour, noticeable in the large black surface which contrasts with the striking blue centre and a reference to the indeterminate and radical space in his "dream paintings" from 1925 and 1927.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio