Miroir Noir
*Our mission is to show the other side of the mirror.*
Miroir Noir is a collaborative painting project established in 2007 by Rai Escalé (Barcelona) and Miloš Kopták (Bratislava). Transcending the boundaries of traditional artistic cooperation, the duo operates through the dissolution of individual authorship, sacrificing the personal ego to give rise to a "Third Voice": an autonomous painterly subject that thrives on stylistic anarchy and formal risk.
Their practice is theoretically anchored in the concept of "Cecillism"—a critical strategy that embraces error, distortion, and "productive failure" as tools for intellectual inquiry. By sabotaging classical iconography and deconstructing the myth of the "Grand Master," Miroir Noir transforms the canvas into a site of resistance against normativity. Their work features hybrid bodies, hacked myths, and fluid identities, generating a "structural friction" that challenges both historical memory and the banality of contemporary visual culture.
With an international trajectory including exhibitions in Spain, Slovakia, Germany, and Austria, Miroir Noir stands as one of the most provocative and essential voices in contemporary European critical painting.
Spring 2017, 10th Anniversary thoughts
What started out as a playful painterly party for two has become a loaded machine gun with its own criteria to trigger and shoot. And we have been the first surprised!
We had to learn how to live and think as one in the portable painting workshop we've set up countless times in many different places.
We kept changing the rules we set for each new get-together or exhibition project, in order to make them as challenging and as close to a first time as possible.
No self replicas or anxious mannerisms are allowed in the studio.
Our individual visions and styles are based upon transgressions from beauty and reality, and we try to synchronize them to get the right destillate.
We search for the equilibrium between beauty and its negation, and we try to present it with the emotions we find when we get lost in an unsettling dream.
Spring 2022, after a two years resilience test and a 15th anniversary date
It started as 'just another flu' while we were working in Bratislava, end of February 2020. Rai had to fly back on Monday, March the 2nd. We decided to spend last Sunday, March first in Prague, where we wanted to visit Michaël Borremans exhibition at the Rudolfinum Galerie. And so we did, but strangely surrounded by a strange disproportion of Italians. After one week, we learned they were flying away from the first European Covid-19 focus, in Milano and the north of Italy.
Rai managed to get back to Barcelona one week before lockdown, and Miroir Noir has been in forced stand-by since then. All the exhibitions in 2020 were postponed or suspended, and so all the activity in 2021.
So, as for everyone else, it has been a very strange test to overcome, but we still are, and have just booked a flight for mid-March 2022 to re-start pictorial activity in our Bratislava Studio, and we will have an exhibition @ čIN čIN Galeria in Bratislava from next March 24th to April 22th.
And our first meeting was on April 3rd, 2007. So Happy Birthday Miroir Noir. Oh wow, 15 years have passed by, who would have said so. Long life MN
Long life MN
Miroir Noir artworks for sale online: Saatchi Online USA /// AIGUA CAT
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We're looking for suitable galleries to represent us in France, Germany and Austria.
