Ah, Miro, Miro, Joan Miró! The world this man paints is filled with an unidentifiable charm, as if a drunken bird in a dream had spilled magical ink across the canvas of the night sky and wandered through it.
Artists, by nature, tend to furrow their brows and carry heavy luggage—history, philosophy, or the pride of their own solitude—smearing it all together with their pigments to show off. But Miró was different. He soaked up the sun of Barcelona, caught the Mediterranean breeze, and dashed through the labyrinth of art with an innocent yet fearless gait, much like a child scribbling on the ground with a stick.
Look at the lines he draws. They stretch out thin and wobbly, and just when you wonder where they are going, they curl into a loop, and there—a single small star appears. Or a mysterious shape that belongs to no recognizable face looks your way and whispers, “Hello.” Scholars love to categorize this with difficult words like “Surrealism,” but such logic hardly matters. In front of Miró’s paintings, we should simply return to being children.
After all, living seriously is unexpectedly exhausting. You wake up, wash your face, get tossed about by social obligations and human emotions, and bow your head for tomorrow’s bread. When your heart becomes parched and dry from it all, Miró’s reds and yellows soak in like cold water to a thirsty throat. His paintings are free from that sickness called “meaning.” A star is a star, a woman is a woman, or perhaps they are just a “something” beyond any name.
Miró loved the earth. The rough soil of Mallorca, the scent of the farm—that primal strength of the land flows through his roots. The depth of life in his work is entirely different from the sophisticated, merely “stylish” paintings of the city. He once said that he began by “dirtying the canvas.” What a wonderful sentiment. We fear failure, hate getting dirty, and try to write down the beautiful “correct” answer from the start, only to end up writing nothing at all. But Miró would kick the canvas, scratch it, and find his own universe within the accidental shapes born from that chaos.
The “eyes” he paints are always wide, opened as if in constant surprise. They are eyes of eternal wonder that refuse to see the world as “ordinary.” As we age, we tend to dismiss the beauty of a flower, the depth of the night sky, or the mystery of the person next to us as things we already “know.” However, the creatures drifting in Miró’s cosmos possess a vividness as if they were born just a moment ago, teaching us that the world is such a strange and delightful place.
Art should not be for some high-and-mighty elite; it should be the liberation of the soul. Looking at Miró’s paintings, I feel the dark lumps in my heart turning transparent. The courage to leave things that cannot be explained by logic exactly as they are. He expressed that courage like a light, airy dance.
Now, why don’t you all stop making such difficult faces for a moment and look up at Miró’s mysterious stars? A free wind, one you had almost forgotten, is blowing there. If you let go of the gravity of heavy reality and catch hold of one of those wobbly lines, you might just fly to the edge of the sky. After all, life might truly be something that nonsensical, that beautiful, and that hilarious.