Puzzle Head – Mirò

André Breton said of his Spanish colleague that Miró is probably the most surrealist of all the surrealists. However, it is not dreams that inspire the composition, but a particular state of hallucination .

Everything, or almost everything, is perfectly recognizable , although transfigured, and can be related to an existing object or a geometric entity, which everyone has, has had, or can have experience of in real life. The bright, joyful colors and the affectionate forms of benign, playful little beings evoke “the magical side of things,” as Miró himself explained.
Slowly the artist tends to conquer the space which is concretized in the monochrome of the background of the paintings, a background that gives structure and support to the small and harmonious forms alluding to reality.
From the Constellations series we observe The Stairway of Escape . Executed in 1940, and exhibited that same year at Pierre Matisse’s New York gallery, it demonstrates a further automatic painting method.

Miró writes about this:

“The idea for the background was the starting point that inspired everything else. It happened like this: in Paris I had bought a brush cleaning pad, and when I used it for the first time, I was amazed at the result. From then on, every time I finished a Constellation, I cleaned my brushes on a new page, thus preparing the background for the next one.”

As is clear, therefore, the artist begins to paint on an inadvertently prepared paper and whose chromatic appearance is the result of cleaning the brushes during the execution of a previously created work.
Therefore, each Constellation contains within itself the chromatic essence of the previous one, and all are united by a subtle thread of colors. This was the reason why, during the creation of the 23 paintings , the artist never separated himself from any of them and, indeed, worked surrounded by the finished ones, which became a source of inspiration for variations on the same theme.