Miroir Noir

About Miroir Noir

Miroir Noir, the Black Mirror, is a couple of artists: Slovak Miloš Kopták and Catalan Rai Escalé. The middle-aged artists have pursued their careers in their home countries. Miloš Kopták is a book illustrator and gallery owner. Rai Escalé is a painter and artist known on the Catalan art scene. However, the Spaniard Escalé saw the works by Miloš Kopták in 2007 and decided to ask him for cooperation. And since then they have collaborated in painting. Their cooperation did not begin at the academy or within the Erasmus programme and similar projects. At that time they were middle-aged and were pursuing their artistic careers. They called their cooperation Miroir Noir – Black Mirror – as a reference to the legend of the black mirror: 17th century painters looked into the mirror when they wanted to relax after exhausting work on paintings. It is also an explanatory reference to their common aesthetic. It goes back to the roots of the great painters, Goya, Murillo, Velázquez, and acts as a dialogue with great painters of the past through the medium of expressive “black paintings”. The aesthetic of dark emotional undertones in painting and art in general has a long tradition in Spain and is associated with great figures that refined it. On the Central European art scene it refers to the works by Franz Kafka and Josef Váchal. The first works by the Miroir Noir were appropriations and re-paintings of posters and billboards resulting in weird portraits of anonymous people. They first exhibited their works in Spain in the Iguapop and Eat Meat Galleries in Barcelona, focusing on dark, post-Punk aesthetic relevant to the production of the Miroir Noir . Their exhibition in the Blokker Gallery in Madrid in 2013 was highlighted in the daily El País that brought a two-page article entitled “Baroque Punk for Art and Four Hands”.It attracted viewers and collectors from around the world (the daily is available in all Spanish-speaking countries). The realistic subjects of their works draw on current social issues and they also present their own themes. They draw inspiration from the photographs purchased at flea markets across Europe, or explore their family archives of several successive generations. The realistic scene is painted on canvas and subsequently destroyed, as they say, “negated” to achieve free expression. The subject of brides and wedding portraits is based on their own experience and family traumas caused by marriage, depicting blurred and unclear staged studio double portraits. This important moment in human life captures the happiness of the bride and groom in staged photographs. The paintings are similar to the series of portraits of twin sisters at the ceremony of consecration, or first Communion. The Miroir Noir prefers to explore the subjects of repeated ceremony and staged personal purity as a certain public social act. They admit that they have participated in these family commitments and revive their memories as observers in clean starched clothing, not quite agreeing with their roles. The whole series includes cycles of brides called Propter Nuptias and wedding bouquets. Actually, the brides are not happy because they are dead brides. Their portraits were painted after the portraits of prostitutes and pornographic actors. The third group of exhibited paintings, somewhat unrelated to intellectually refined brides and double portraits of newlyweds, is a series of dogs. After a rather confrontational theme of brides, it gives the paintings an air of calm. The series of dogs Canis Lunae displays excellent, unrestrained expressive painting. In relation to subject matter it expresses a completely different subject: a loyal relationship between man and dog often made superior to the relationship between people. All the subjects explored by the Miroir Noir seem to share a common criticism of objects, phenomena and the personality cult.