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Lot Essay
Composition fond blanc is one of fifteen exceptional paintings executed on a white ground that form the culmination of a series of "dream" paintings which Miró executed at this time. Miró's "dream" paintings were the product of a conscious attempt to improvise forms from unconscious stimuli with the aim of revealing the hitherto hidden visual poetry of the world. Severely impoverished during this early stage in his career, hunger played a significant role in the creation of the forms of the radically new paintings Miró began to produce. "I'd go home in the evenings to my studio in the rue Blomet, I'd go to bed, I hadn't always eaten, I saw things, I noted them in notebooks. I saw shapes in the cracks in the walls, in the ceiling, especially the ceiling" (Joan Miró: Carnets Catalans: dessins et textes inedits, Geneva, 1976, p. 72).
Using this methodical approach to recording the hallucinatory visual jumps of his mind, "signs of an imaginary writing" began to appear in his work. "I painted without premeditation," Miró recalled, "as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free. I owed this lighthearted atmosphere to the influence of Dada... Later a deepening sense of the marvelous led me to the notion of the fantastic. I was no longer subjected to dream-dictation, I created my dreams through my paintings... I escaped into the absolute of nature. I wanted my spots to seem to open to the magnetic appeal of the void. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds, and my linear gestures on top were the signs of my dream progression" (Selected Writings, op.cit., pp. 264-5).
The paintings on a white ground were the logical conclusion of this approach, expressing in stark contrast the poetic interaction between Miró's vivid and whimsical imagination and the vast white emptiness of the void. The simplicity of Miró's reductive approach led to his work growing close to abstraction - a feature that generates a strong sense of universality making his images seem somewhat other-worldly. As Miró himself observed, "during those years my painting no longer showed the pull of gravity" and wanting to give his work what he described as an "astral quality" he deliberately encouraged the cosmic nature of his dream-inspired imagery. With its coloured stars surrounding a mysterious smoking black shape, Composition fond blanc is one of four of the paintings on a white ground to assert a cosmic reading of its mysterious poetic imagery.
Using this methodical approach to recording the hallucinatory visual jumps of his mind, "signs of an imaginary writing" began to appear in his work. "I painted without premeditation," Miró recalled, "as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free. I owed this lighthearted atmosphere to the influence of Dada... Later a deepening sense of the marvelous led me to the notion of the fantastic. I was no longer subjected to dream-dictation, I created my dreams through my paintings... I escaped into the absolute of nature. I wanted my spots to seem to open to the magnetic appeal of the void. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds, and my linear gestures on top were the signs of my dream progression" (Selected Writings, op.cit., pp. 264-5).
The paintings on a white ground were the logical conclusion of this approach, expressing in stark contrast the poetic interaction between Miró's vivid and whimsical imagination and the vast white emptiness of the void. The simplicity of Miró's reductive approach led to his work growing close to abstraction - a feature that generates a strong sense of universality making his images seem somewhat other-worldly. As Miró himself observed, "during those years my painting no longer showed the pull of gravity" and wanting to give his work what he described as an "astral quality" he deliberately encouraged the cosmic nature of his dream-inspired imagery. With its coloured stars surrounding a mysterious smoking black shape, Composition fond blanc is one of four of the paintings on a white ground to assert a cosmic reading of its mysterious poetic imagery.