The phrase is taken from Carolyn Lanchner's book Joan Miro, (MOMA New York, 1993, p 18 ff).

'The tension in Miro's pictures between abstraction and representation is central, even as his work as a whole is poised between complementary dualities. The man himself was both visionary poet and meticulous craftsman - concerned to the point of obsession with balancing the demands of freedom and formality. Indeed, each of the many different paths he explored, whether in painting, drawing, sculpture, or other mediums, was a response to this problem of duality: how to find fresh means of expressing a vision of the world as the site of ceaseless mutations between the terrestrial and the cosmic, the sensuous and the spiritual.'