Sobreteixim

Sobreteixim was Miró´s first experience with textiles. Apart from drawing some signs that sought out the lines of force and ended up by being or seeming abstract, he introduced the elements of textiles in an informalist way. Miró aspired to something very essential within the thinking of contemporary art, which valued what had previously been considered primitive. If Picasso appeared more interested in unravelling a purely objective reality, proceeding like a child who destroys a toy in order to see what’s inside it, Miró leaned towards basically the opposite approach: what interested him was innocence, which was absent in Picasso. Picasso and Miró, both of whom were great creators, traced two lines that were parallel but at the same time divergent. Miró revealed concerns that were distant from modernism in the usual sense, and attempted to recover the lost threads, placing himself at point zero in art.

This tapestry is produced, like all of them, with Josep Royo. As opposed to those that he would do later, this is essentially pictorial, conceived as a painting. Later, with a strict tapestry technique, or with ensembles of sackcloth or cloth from other uses, he executed less conventional works. But the charm of this Sobreteixim is that of the painting, to which is added that of the new material. And the interest that Miró always had in unusual materials, enabling him to break with rules and expectations, is well known. This is especially seen in the Sobreteixims, as James Johnson Sweeney noted in the catalogue of the exhibition of works of this type in the Pierre Matisse Gallery of New York in October 1973: “And today, in his eightieth year, the play of materials and their inter-relationships, which constitutes the essence of the Sobreteixims, shows that this is still the case”.