Head of a Catalan Peasant (2) 1925

Joan Miró made this painting, Head of a Catalan Peasant (2), with oil paint, and his process seems like one of playful reduction. The colour palette is simple, dominated by red, yellow, and blue against a subtly textured background, which really brings out the childlike quality of his forms. The material qualities of this work— the slight, almost naive execution of those simple forms – invites a direct, emotional response. The red form at the top, like a hat or a strange growth, contrasts with the softer, cloud-like blue. It’s like he's trying to figure out what the most basic unit of a person is, or what the ingredients might be, to bake up a person from scratch. That grid lightly sketched in the background…it’s like a page from a notebook, suggesting the work is a sketch, maybe, not a finished thing. This feels like an early deconstruction, something akin to what Picasso was working on at the time, but it’s also totally Miró’s own strange world. It reminds us that art is always an experiment, a conversation, not a declaration.