PASSARIANO.- An evocative exhibition retraces the last thirty years of Miró’s universe recreating the atmosphere of his Mallorcan studios, his search for solitude and the radical transformation of his art.

Over 250 artworks by Miró, many personal objects and documents, and about 50 photos of the artist taken by great photographers constitute a very special exhibition.

There is a period of time in Joan Miró’s artistic life that still needs to be studied and analyzed – and it is this very period that shows us an artist who is dialoguing with himself and who is on the lookout for a creative renewal of shapes and contents.

Under the title “Joan Miró a Villa Manin. Soli di notte” a new and exciting exhibition is taking place at Villa Manin di Passariano (Udine) from 17 October 2015 to 3 April 2016: this is a great opportunity to discover new and fascinating aspects of the last creative period and the inner world of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

The exhibition is based on an original design approach and features approximately 250 artworks, including large paintings, sculptures, drawings, sketches and projects by the artist from the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró of Palma de Mallorca and from the collections of the heirs – with some interesting surprises and previews – enriched with original documents and many personal objects previously owned by the artist. Furthermore, an extraordinary focus has been set on a collection of about 50 photos of Miró which have been taken by the greatest photographers of those times: Bresson, Mulas, Brassaï, List, Man Ray, Halsmann, Gomis and many more.

But above all, this exhibition wants to be absolutely evocative of places, environments, sounds and emotions which accompanied the Catalan painter in the last thirty years of his life spent in Palma de Mallorca, and inspired from 1956 to 1983 – the year of his death – a radical change of his expressive and technical work and of his extraordinary art.

In those years and in the solitude of the two studios on Mallorca – the Sert Studio designed for him by his architect friend Luis Sert in 1956 and the Son Boter Studio set up subsequently for large-scale sculptures in a nearby building from the 17th century – Miró undertakes a process of deep critical analysis of his previous work and a process of transformation.

At the age of 63, the artist has finally the privilege of a place to isolate himself and live in close contact with his works; it is not just a simple architectural context, it is a protected area, where his paintings may mature over time and spur a dialogue among themselves; it is a large space for “dreaming” and “hallucinating”, a container where Miró wants to be in solitude facing the vertigo of creation. He underlines this concept with the following words: “When I didn’t have my own studio, I felt very uncomfortable: I was in need of solitude.”

“Soli di notte - Alone at night”, as the title of the exhibition suggests. In the light of the island of Mallorca Miró’s painting disrobes itself, it becomes essential and loses colors to leave more room for immediate and violent signs, and to clear the way for a gradual simplification of the expressive gesture and the color black: a dramatic and definitive black, which gives proof of the artist’s research around the themes of silence and emptiness.

Miró now creates works that are very different from the surrealist period of the thirties, as the painting Oiseaux dans un Paysage (1974) emblematically shows: this artwork from a private collection in Palma de Mallorca and exhibited in Italy only in the early 1980s has been chosen as the iconic image of the exhibition.

The environment in which the artist can finally work also allows for new experiments: Miró has abandoned the easel and works primarily on the floor; he can walk or lie freely on the canvas, he lets excess color drip onto the canvas: in polychrome paintings he uses turpentine to prepare the ground for his works – the very same turpentine he uses to clean his paintbrushes: thus stains, splashes and random drips are made from which Miró proceeds to create violent and dynamic signs; the characters arise from the background, and are always outlined by very strong, black lines.

Careful self-criticism of the previous production is at the basis of Miró’s artistic maturity as he can now light-heartedly describe his new situation: “... in the new studio for the first time I had enough space, I could unpack crates of works that were accumulating from year to year ... Unpacking everything in Mallorca triggered my process of self-criticism.”

The studio, as he himself says, becomes a vegetable patch, an inner garden, a territory, a sacred enclosure. And the relationship with the environment and with the context of his work becomes personal and compelling, every detail is vital and functional for his creativity: it’s like an alchemy, a magic moment that the exhibition at Villa Manin aims to recreate through relationships and interconnections between masterpieces on show and other exhibited objects.

Visitors will see an absolutely original curatorial project entrusted to Elvira Cámara López and Marco Minuz for an exhibition that is completely different from previous showcasing events on Miró in Italy.

Miró did not opt for Palma de Mallorca randomly. His choice to set up his studio “refuge” on the island, his “hideaway” or “cave” as he called it, was deliberately planned. He wanted a studio where the creative act could free itself and inspiration could be fostered by a universe of objects, brushes, colors and notes: these were small fractions of signs and significance to reassemble during the search for new languages. Also, Mallorca was his mother’s birthplace and as a child the painter from Barcelona spent many summer holidays with his extended family. On Mallorca he had met Pilar, who became his wife in 1929, and between 1940 and 1942 during the Nazi invasion of France, where Miró had been living at the time, the painter took refuge on the Spanish island.

Hence Miró sought a place of memories, a place of aff ections, a place for the soul to rethink his art and transform it completely.

An inner feeling and a slow maturation of his artistic expression – which was also stimulated by the encounter with the Japanese culture and the great success of American abstract expressionism following the Second World War – is the leitmotiv of the Villa Manin exhibition, which leads us into the private universe of this dreamy and passionate artist thus helping us understand the transformation of his art.

For example, the exhibition features the first-ever recreation of the “red room” – with original objects transferred to Villa Manin for the occasion – a very private, Renaissance-like atelier that has never been open to the public and was originally housed in the Son Boter Studio, where Miró loved sitting in his chair and think, surrounded by the oil portraits of his parents and, next to them, the photos showing two important persons: his countryman Pablo Picasso and the “hat-maker” Joan Prats, his first patron and a collector of his artworks.

The exhibition is a real emotional short circuit with a multimedia installation specially commissioned for the occasion to musician-composer Teho Teardo, who mixes sounds and images collected on the island and in the studio in Palma, thus creating an artistic work of great impact.

And then Son Boter: the studio set up in 1959 in a typical farm building next to Miró’s property and complete with an in-house engraving and printmaking workshop is highlighted in a separate section of the exhibition. The artist used the white limestone walls of the building like a notebook, covering them with still visible charcoal graffiti and notes for sculptural projects. The exhibition also shows sculptures, some of considerable size and impact, with corresponding sketches and projects, but also many personal items – tribal statuettes and siurells, traditional Mallorcan ceramics that can be played like an instrument – that Miró liked to accumulate in the studio: “... everything that I allow in here is connected to my work, all these things serve as reminders, I need these things to create an atmosphere.”

A creative “atmosphere” is what the curators intended to restore at Villa Manin, because the spiritual strength and freedom of the Mallorcan environment have been a magical mixture allowing the Catalan master to disrupt and revolutionize his artistic career by leaving a message of deep interiority: “... what interests me isn’t the painting that continues to exist, but its radiation, its message, what it will do to change the spirit of the people a little bit “.