In La Femme de sables (Lot 2) and Le Penseur puissant (Lot 5) Miró uses carborundum to the extreme: creating heavy characters with a surface equivalent to the thick impasto of oil paintings. Lots 1 – 6 in Phillips’ upcoming Evening & Day Editions auction exemplify Miró’s breadth with the medium. The rich, sooty “blackness” of the carborundum overwhelms the viewer with the enormity of each depicted character and creates a unique visceral visual impact. The group can largely be defined as an assembly of fantastical figures, filled with Miró ’s entrancing spirit and nocturnal energy. Miró created at least 72 prints using this silicon carbide technique: the number alone speaks for how much he enjoyed experimenting with Goetz’s invention. La Femme des sables (The Woman of the Sands), 1959. Les Grandes Manœuvres (The Great Manoeuvres), 1973. Joan Miró, Prise à l'hameçon (Hooked), 1969. Miró used three mediums to build up multi-layered images: aquatint for background color, etching for outline forms, and finally the carborundum for texture and depth. The series of works that followed were not only monumental in size, but also in the strength of compositional design, and the volcanic projection of texture to the surface. Areas of a plate were built up so heavily with the silicon carbide that when pressed, the paper would be moulded into depressions and further depth to each image was achieved. The medium lent itself to large scale works with little difficulty, adding a tactile, three-dimensional quality rarely seen before in printmaking. In the workshop at the Maeght Foundation, at Saint-Paul de Vence in the South of France, Miró and Dutrou commenced work on a series of prints utilizing this new invention by Henri Goetz. The interstices between the carbide grains and the streaks in the varnish replace the holes or grooves in the metal itself… These interstices, which hold the printing ink, give ink back to the moist paper, under press, to create a print.” Goetz described his technique as “consist of setting very high-pressure resistant substances such as silicon carbide, synthetic varnish, or both, on the plate surface. Goetz’s method involved applying a paste of carborundum powder and binder to the copper printing plate, which solidified into a firm superstructure and created a raised surface with a brushstroke-like texture. His technique differed to traditional engraving, in which the surface of a copper plate is incised, by replacing incised work with relief work. Silicon carbide had been manufactured as an abrasive since 1893, but in the 1960s, French Surrealist painter and engraver Henri Goetz invented a new printing method using this substance. Joan Miró, Le Caissier (The Cashier), 1969.
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