Giulia Privitelli, from Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, writes about Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, the two Spanish artists that took on the world and whose works will be on exhibit in Malta later this year.

“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I am overwhelmed when I see a crescent moon or the sun in an immense sky. In my paintings there are often tiny forms in vast empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything that has been stripped bare has always made a strong impression on me.”

The Spanish 20th century artist, Joan Miró (1929-1983), had a great love for the natural world, for the objects that populate it and the essence of the earth: “For the calligraphy of a tree, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade of grass by blade of grass, tile by tile.” In other words, Miró was intrigued by the easily overlooked mundane details which pepper the external world, and instead drew them up as microcosmic constellations in a field of paint.

This is Miró’s universe which, in a deeply human and spiritual way extends into our own. And this same universe is described in a collection of painted works which will be brought over to Malta between April and June 2 for an exhibition celebrating Picasso & Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit.

Femme, by Joan Miró.

This exhibition, which is a satellite of a major international project Picasso-Méditerranée, aims to present the 20th-century dilemma of creation – that aesthetic expression which allows us to encounter and question those most profound reasons of ‘seeing’ – through a suite of 100 etchings by Pablo Picasso and some 40 paintings by Joan Miró, 11 years his junior. Here, art may be seen as a practice which is, ironically, not quite a matter of creating images, as much as it is a reflection of the manner in which human, subjective eyes perceive reality. It thus allows for an infinite number of perspectives with which our consciousness may interact, leading us to ask questions on what it means to look, to see, and to engage with the visible details of our world, with the most profound ‘hidden’ secrets of their origin, and the reasons of why they exist. In this way, the works largely refer to a symbolic dimension, and yet, are wholly a celebration of the visible world, even though we might not recognise anything of what is depicted.

Therefore, the contemplation of such artwork cannot be reduced to mere aesthetic beauty, to the pleasure of recognising beautiful and harmonious forms.

Each artwork, in its own way, becomes a journey of discovery into the profound nature of things. “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible,” would maintain German expressionist Paul Klee. Wassily Kandinsky too, like Miró, explicitly delved into the relationship between the spirit and art, wherein the spirit is taken to manifest itself in the dynamic harmony of colour and forms, at the cost of mimetic representation.

If in the 20th century the concept of representation was put into question in order to affirm that art ought no longer limit itself to the depiction of human events, it allowed instead for the emergence of an archaic, somewhat ‘mythic’ image – an independent image which does not belong to any particular belief, religion or movement. As Miró himself puts it: “Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work.”

But for Miró, the image was never quite about the visual result. Rather, this method of searching for an image reveals an affinity to a special kind of symbolic order, that is, the representation bears similarity to something which is born from those silent, dark and deep recesses of human origin, and the human mind. It is there where Miró finds his best expression.

Peinture, by Joan Miró.

“In the noise hidden in silence, the movement in immovability, life in inanimate things, the infinite in the finite, forms in a void, and myself in anonymity.”

In this way, such images refer to a common primitive ancestry which are able, even, to transport us back to that enigmatic way of seeing and experiencing the imagined, yet heightened real world within the cave.

Much like Picasso’s minotaur, or Miró’s monsters, the idol, the beast and the unrecognisable motif are primordial images whose expressive power intensely emanates outwards.

It is they who have a hold over the viewer. It is they who are in control. They are works which have the strength to draw us back in to our humanity, to the flesh of our limited selves.

Like Miró who gazes upon the immense sky and allows it to overwhelm him by its spectacle, we too – the viewers – can only but observe, contemplate and wonder at what we do not have the tools to understand.

Picasso and Miró: The Flesh and the Spirit is being organised by Fundación Mapfre in collaboration with the Office of the President of Malta and Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti. It will be open to the public between April 7 and June 30 at the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta.