Guinovart. The connection with Miró

Guinovart. The connection with Miró

All through his career, Josep Guinovart i Bertran (Barcelona 1927-2007) expressed the interest and admiration he always felt for Miró. Thus, there are a series of signs and iconographic elements he used in order to evoke Miró’s universe: cosmic elements (stars, moon, sun and constellations), cell-shaped and organic; different types of writing, calligraphic signs and colour stains filling the space freely.

Guinovart’s visual language has many points of connection with Miró’s work. Both share the need to break the boundaries between daily and artistic reality, and take part in the sense of liberty that lets the artwork speak for itself, according to the surrealist notion of expressive automatism.

Another point in common was their critical attitude and their political, civic and social commitment, in which they were fully active. And also the faithfulness to their roots (geographic, historical, linguistic and cultural) with a great interest in the enhancement of everything local that becomes universal. In this sense, they also have in common the use of simple everyday objects; objects from traditional culture, especially from the world of Catalan peasants (pitchforks, sickles, clay water jugs, “porrons” -traditional glass wine pitchers-, etc.).

And finally, their fascination with found objects and waste material, which -more or less transformed or manipulated-, both of them add to their compositions, and which they imbued with a new poetics and a new cultural and human significance. Attentive to the vibrations of the most essential things of their immediate surroundings, both artists tried to capture the breath of life and the energy inherent in them.