Auto-Impression: Miró @ Tate Modern, The Ladder of Escape [Visit 2]

Writing without a brief is liberating, but I wonder if it's not also indulgent.  By 'Auto-Impression' I meant a sketch of my reactions to the Ladder of Escape, seeing it a second time round.  But the value of that is questionable: if I want readers to derive something other than my opinions from this blog, it has to be my opinions framed within intentions.  To this end, I shall write about the growing sense of liberation one can discern in the Miró exhibition's paintings.

The precision of the architectural depiction in Mont-roig, the Church and the Village and The Farm became startlingly apparent to me today.  Having woken up to this, I think I started to find Miró's attention to detail and meticulousness more prominent, especially with regard to the Constellations series, but the pastel drawings and 'neons' on copper are also treated with an artistic exactitude of some force.  If one considers The Ladder of Escape (1940), the way the figures' eyes are ringed with colour is executed with such precision that it has to have been deliberate.  Formally, then, many of the pre-1950 paintings are painstakingly constructed.

Which is why a painting like May '68, by contrast, really stood out today.  Colour is used here--I would argue--for its own sake: yellows, red, blue and green inhabit the canvas in order to be colour over and above structure, whereas the treatment of colour in The Ladder of Escape (1940) painting is so formalised that colour and structure collapse partially, becoming coterminous.  Where the structure comes to the fore in May '68 is in the thick black contours that lie atop the other elements of the painting.  It is as if the precision and formality of Miró's earlier art has been escaped to reveal a practice that, while still valuing exact form and structure, adopts an entirely distinct manner of conveying emotional impact, abandoning an obvious 'cleanness' for a technique that lays bare, in fact advertises, the productive-creative process.

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