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Lot Essay
The present work belongs to a small series of untitled collages on sandpaper, which Mir executed in the winter months of 1933.
"During the winter and spring of 1934 Mir kept on experimenting, especially with drawing, carrying his researches ever farther , but every bit as surely. He tried new mediums, such as sheets of black paper and sandpaper; he experimented with a powdered form of pastels; and he essayed new combinations, such as pastel with India ink, and collage with oil painting. His explorations of new materials were not so much that, as a kind of encouragement to them to show him their possibilities; he has always had the gift of making materials speak, and speak, moreover, a new though always natural language.
On sandpaper, he first of all executed several paintings in many colors (op.cit. p.318, nos. 394-396)... His fondness for highly sensitive grounds told him how much could be obtained from the grainy, gritty, yet luminous texture of sandpaper. The forms he set down on it are very assertive, but they seem to propagate themselves freely in almost indefinable figurations, all curves and lengthy elaborations, sharply defined and sober in color. The very dense texture of the sandpaper flattens forms as no other medium does, giving the lines the quality of extreme rapidity...With figures reduced to nonchalantly tormented contours, Mir seems to be undertaking an exploration of the infinitesimal. He is capturing a world at the moment of growth, when it is opposed by the resistence of its milieu, even (or so it seems) by the very hesitations of its thought." (Jaques Dupin, Joan Mir Life and Work, London, 1962, pp.256-258).
"During the winter and spring of 1934 Mir kept on experimenting, especially with drawing, carrying his researches ever farther , but every bit as surely. He tried new mediums, such as sheets of black paper and sandpaper; he experimented with a powdered form of pastels; and he essayed new combinations, such as pastel with India ink, and collage with oil painting. His explorations of new materials were not so much that, as a kind of encouragement to them to show him their possibilities; he has always had the gift of making materials speak, and speak, moreover, a new though always natural language.
On sandpaper, he first of all executed several paintings in many colors (op.cit. p.318, nos. 394-396)... His fondness for highly sensitive grounds told him how much could be obtained from the grainy, gritty, yet luminous texture of sandpaper. The forms he set down on it are very assertive, but they seem to propagate themselves freely in almost indefinable figurations, all curves and lengthy elaborations, sharply defined and sober in color. The very dense texture of the sandpaper flattens forms as no other medium does, giving the lines the quality of extreme rapidity...With figures reduced to nonchalantly tormented contours, Mir seems to be undertaking an exploration of the infinitesimal. He is capturing a world at the moment of growth, when it is opposed by the resistence of its milieu, even (or so it seems) by the very hesitations of its thought." (Jaques Dupin, Joan Mir Life and Work, London, 1962, pp.256-258).