Femmes, oiseau dans la nuit (Women, Bird in the Night)

Ever since Joan Miró created the legendary series of 23 gouaches entitled Constelaciones (Constellations, January 1940-September 1941), the themes of the night and his star-filled universe assumed a central role in his work. Femmes, oiseau dans la nuit (Women and Bird in the Night, 1974) is a large canvas, which on a formal level is unrelated to the series of small-scale works that the Catalan painter worked on in his final years, but as in those pieces, this work refers to an indefinite and infinite space inhabited by personages, birds and stars. On a uniform white background, Miró defines figures using the contrast of colour and his linguistic signs of black lines; he dares to use various mediums, acrylic, oil, charcoal or graphite, and uses different techniques in each section of the painting to produce a visually precise work that is also complex in meaning. In this sense, he uses the word "orange" to refer to the concept of colour through the written word, renewing the process of poetic-pictorial introspection that defined his work in the twenties, and which he himself later described, remarking: "the painter lives in a world that is not that of the poet or the musician, but he is the judge, because he is the one that creates. This is the reason why I have not totally agreed with the Surrealists, who judged a painting based on its poetic or emotional, or even anecdotal, content. I have always valued poetic content based on its artistic possibility".

Carmen Fernández Aparicio