Galerie Lelong, Paris

A. Cirici, Miró-Mirall, Polígrafa, Barcelona, 1977, no. 175, p. 156
J. Dupin & A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, vol. V: 1969-1975, Paris, 2003, no. 1600, p. 204 (illustrated in colour)

Pure and precise, Paysage possesses the terse simplicity of a Japanese haiku. Black, red and blue ellipses are carefully counterbalanced in a vast and vaporous off-white ground, the surrounding lightness revealing the weight of their forms as if they were planets hung suspended in the celestial void. Painted in 1974, as the irrepressible Miró entered his eighth decade, this extraordinarily understated composition resonates with a metaphysical presence, just as sonorous musical notes might ring out in a silent space. For much of his career, Miró fluctuated between the conflicting creative impulses of dense images awash with a riot of colour, to sparse graphic works that are light-filled and poetic. From moments of restraint to bursts of untamed freedom, there were no rules and no limits, expressed in an enormous oeuvre comprising paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and ceramics. When Paysage was painted, Miró was in a phase of emptying out his canvases once more, stripping his forms to their absolute essentials of colour and shape and giving them room to breathe. This could be a result of working primarily with sculpture during this period, which perhaps prompted Miró's desire to do away with delicate and intricate detail for something bolder and more open.

Miró was much admired by his peers for his keen sensitivity to colour, texture and composition. As Alberto Giacometti once stated: 'Miró was synonymous with freedom--something more aerial, more liberated, lighter than anything I had seen before. In one sense he possessed absolute perfection. Miró could not put a dot on a sheet of paper without hitting square on the target. He was so truly a painter that it was enough for him to drop three spots of colour on the canvas, and it would come to life-- it would be a painting' (quoted in P. Schneider, 'Miró', Horizon, no. 4, March 1959, pp. 70-81). And when Henri Matisse was asked whom he considered a great painter amongst contemporary artists, he answered: 'Miró... because it doesn't matter what he represents on his canvas, but if, in a certain place, he has put a red spot, you can be sure that it had to be there and not elsewhere.... take it away and the painting collapses' (quoted in L. Aragon, Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, p. 147). Indeed, the coloured elements of Paysage are held in such a fine balance it is difficult to imagine the absence of a single shape. The seemingly barren ground also displays the painter’s virtuosity as it is animated by vigorous, uniform brushstrokes, and diffuses tints towards the edges of the canvas that make the centre appear subtly brighter.