For the first time in Naples a major exhibition dedicated to Joan Mirò

The fantastic, dreamlike, feverishly creative world of Joan Miró is presented to the public from 25 September 2019 to 23 February 2020, at the PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, with the exhibition entitled “Joan Miró. The language of signs”.
The exhibition, promoted by the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Municipality of Naples, with the support of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture and the patronage of the Portuguese Embassy in Italy, is organized by the Serralves Foundation of Porto with COR Creare Organizzare Realizzare by Alessandro Nicosia.
Curated by Robert Lubar Messeri, professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, under the precious guidance of Francesca Villanti, scientific director of COR, the exhibition brings together eighty works including paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages and tapestries, all from the extraordinary collection owned by the Portuguese State and on deposit at the Serralves Foundation in Porto.
The 80 works on display cover the long span of Miró's artistic production, from 1924 to 1981; more than six decades of creative activity in which the Catalan artist developed a revolutionary language that transformed XNUMXth-century art.
Through painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, tapestry and engraving, Miró explores the language of signs, the relationship between images and their meaning.
In the summer of 1924, Miró made a radical turn in his investigation of sign formation. Writing to a friend, he described his recent work as follows: “Figuration of one of my latest x’s (I can’t find the word here; I don’t want to say canvas or painting.) […] Portrait of a charming Parisian friend. […] A vertical line for breasts; one is a pear that opens and scatters its little seeds. […] On the other side, an apple pecked by a bird. Sparks fly out of the wound caused by this beak. […] In the upper corner of the canvas there are stars. […] It can barely be called a painting, but I don’t give a damn.”
Taking inventory of the world around him, Miró begins to reduce objects to simple silhouettes and essential elements. This process of reduction and simplification eliminates from his work any trace of representational illusionism and space.
He begins to think of the pictorial surface as a space intended for signs and inscriptions rather than as windows onto the world.
A measured and geometric relationship between figure and ground, between mass and space, had been a constant in Western pictorial tradition for five centuries. Miró undermines the very logic of that visual code: the sign becomes a substitute for something that is no longer physically present.
In perfecting and expanding his visual vocabulary, Miró developed a unique and original style, thus inaugurating a new language of signs, which changed the course of modern art.
To guide us in the difficult and, at the same time, fascinating path of Mirò's art, a scholar of long experience and profound sensitivity: Professor Robert Lubar Messeri, who has followed his footsteps for years, with excellent competence. The scholar has identified nine sections to explain the nodal points of the Spanish artist:
Starting with the 1924 Dancer, it is highlighted how Miró exploits the multiple functions of the line as a contour, as writing and, in the case of the horizon, as an indicator of space, allowing productive exchanges of meaning.
From the beginning of the 1920s, the figure became the favorite subject of Miró's investigations. If the cubists had put the figure under pressure in the context of Western illusionism, Miró undermined the very logic of that visual code. He chose a famous subject like Raphael's La Fornarina to stage his attack on Western illusionism.
Miró creates a universe of soaring birds, astral bodies, gesticulating figures and fantastic creatures that seem to move effortlessly across the surface of the canvas. Sometimes the figure is “found” in the process of creation itself – as if evoked by the marks and stains present on the raw canvas.
Miró is one of the great collage artists of the 1916th century. As early as XNUMX he incorporated a fragment of the Barcelona newspaper La Publicidad into one of his paintings. From then on he returned repeatedly to collage throughout his long career.
The “wild paintings” are the expression of anger towards a world gone mad, overwhelmed by the madness of hatred that will inevitably lead to war. A group of works, including the clearly material Masonite Paintings of 1936, tell his state of mind.
Miró finally empties the reference signs, stripping language down to its primary components. The sign and the graphic gesture take precedence over meaning.
There were several factors that influenced Miró's new way of working, two in particular: Japanese calligraphy and the success of Action Painting in America and Europe.
During the spring of 1973, Miró, collaborating with the weaver Josep Royo, creates a new series of works halfway between painting and sculpture, defined by the critic Alexandre Cirici Pellicer Sobreteixim. In the dense weaves of jute, wool, cotton, hemp and a myriad of other materials that Royo prepares, Miró incorporates common objects.
Miró, again with Royo, executed five Burnt Canvases in December 1973. After cutting the surfaces with a knife, the artist applied masses of pigment to various areas of the canvas, using a torch to spread the paint. Miró and Royo carefully burned the various sections of the support, making the charred structure of the frame visible. He then added more paint and the process began again.
The exhibition therefore offers the public the opportunity to retrace, step by step, the artistic path of the Spanish artist, exploring the key moments of his journey, highlighting changes and elements of continuity.
“A painting,” Miró said, “is never finished, it is never even begun, a painting is like the wind: something that always moves without rest.” He hoped that his works could be a seed ready to germinate in the hands of future generations. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to pick that seed and make it flourish.
All 80 works on display are astonishing, as is the story that brought them to Porto. This set of masterpieces, which belonged to one of the most authoritative and refined dealers of modern art, Pierre Matisse – son of the more famous painter Henri – remained unknown to most for many years, until the Japanese collector, who had jealously guarded them until 2005, decided to sell them to the Banco Português de Negociós. A simple investment for the Portuguese bank, which preferred not to exhibit them and to keep them safe in a vault. When the Banco Português, in serious economic difficulty, decided to put the exceptional acquisition on the market, a nationwide protest arose, so much so that the Portuguese State intervened, suspending the sale and instructing the Serralves Museum to conserve them.
Between October 2016 and June 2017, the works were presented for the first time at the Serralves Museum in Porto, in an exhibition that attracted over 300.000 visitors.
Now it arrives in Naples, giving citizens and tourists the great opportunity to admire a collection that is truly unique in the world.