The Art of Mario Miranda
- Ranjit Hoskote
I began by suggesting that Mario has not been accorded the full measure of recognition that his art deserves. It occurs to me that this may, partly, have to do with the nature of his practice. His work has been distributed across the media and calibrated by the assignment; it has been presented to various publics in episodic bursts, ephemeral fragments, occasional spreads; it has only fitfully been shown in the form of an exhibition, and then only as the precipitate of an overseas trip or an assignment. As viewers, we have never, before the publication of this book, been able to see his work in its totality; or indeed, as a totality. Many discoveries await us here, and many aspects of Mario’s art manifest themselves with the suddenness and conviction of epiphanies. For myself, I realised what a wonderful eye he has for architecture, not in the obvious sense of capturing façades and colonnades, but for grasping and communicating the nuanced rhythms of interaction between built form and daily life.
Mario’s New York suite of 1985 (Pgs 199-211) is a sustained study in verticality: we are impressed by the clean, soaring lines of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and yet their scale is never oppressively Olympian, for it is humanised by the liveliness of signage and street life. His 1993 Israel series (Pgs 215-220) is also distinguished by its lovely evocations of archways and domes; and in his Portugal sequence (Pgs230-233), there occurs one of his finest architectural vistas, the portrait of a city climbing a hillside in stately measure, roof by pointed and gabled roof, wall by mounting wall, the grand ensemble of houses peaking in the crenellations of a castle. It strikes me that this could well be a metaphor for Mario Miranda’s art - a stimulating variousness of interest and approach, all gathered together into the teeming vibrancy of a quest; a choreography of images that, even as they narrate worlds past and elsewhere into being, grow into an inviting and intriguing universe in its own right.
