Antoni Miró is a prolific artist. He is based in a
small town near Alcoi, inland from Alicante in Spain’s Communidad Valenciana. He
works mainly at night and incessantly. He paints. He sculpts. He works on
canvas, in ceramic, metal and with found objects. He works with computer
graphics, and often mixes techniques and media in a single work. He produces
images which often include contemporary themes, political ideas, social issues,
images from film, history, conflict, popular culture, daily life and anything
else that catches his eye. But these images are often transformed by colour, choice
of media or context, often by simple juxtaposition, so the message is transformed,
amplified and thus communicated in an intellectually challenging way, and
always visually arresting.
These particular works on display in Altea are bronze sculptures.
In some ways they are a set of positive and negative images because of the way
they have been conceived and created. A simple way to visualize this idea is to
imagine a sheet of paper having an image cut out. Then imagine working at the
cut-out to add more detail. Next display the cut-out next to the original sheet
which, of course, has a space the same shape as the image. Now repeat with a
large bronze plate. Good luck.
And so for each positive cut-out shape, there is also
a negative, rectangular sheet outlining the shaped space. The effect is doubly
interesting. The positive images have detail incised, so they reveal something
of their setting through themselves. The negatives, obviously, provide an image-shaped
experience of their setting, an image-shaped window opening onto the
environment that contains them. The results are captivating.
But what caused the divided opinions in Valencia was
the works’ subject matter. For this Antoni Miró turned to images he found
illustrated on ancient Greek pottery, and some of these are highly erotic.
Hence my title, Sex on the Beach. The artist, meanwhile, likes to remind
everyone that these images are based on originals that are 2,500 years old. In
many respects, human beings possibly have not changed much in that time, and
that may be the point. Indeed, some of the sculptures have been damaged by
vandals. It seems that some people in Altea objected to the content of these
images, an opinion that automatically endowed a few of those same individuals
with the right to mangle some of the work. Lists of cocktails were not attacked,
apparently.
But there is much more to Antoni Miró’s work than mere
controversy. Works in other locations
throughout the town illustrate the breadth of this artist’s vision. In the
space in front of the Palau Altea, the town’s impressive concert venue, there
are other positive-negative bronzes inspired by the paintings of Magritte, that
might equally be Stan Laurel. There is an immovable bicycle parked on a plinth,
its handlebars transformed into a single wing-like shape that suggests flight,
while nearby its negative outline pierces its bronze plate, affording a
bicycle-shaped view of the University of Alicante’s Fine Arts Faculty behind,
an image that in itself does not normally provoke violent reaction.
Antoni Miró’s art sits firmly in the melting pot of
contemporary Spanish art, though he himself might prefer the label Catalan, or
Valencian. It approaches photorealism at times, but is suffused with surrealism,
the comment of Goya and the almost explosive still-life of the baroque. But it
is also intellectually rigorous, thought-provoking and vivid, often so much so
that it provokes reaction. And this reaction is not about the art’s
abstraction, it is a rejection of its realism. Now there is something novel.
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