Fruit-piece 1912

Pyotr Konchalovsky made this oil painting, 'Fruit-piece', sometime in the early part of the twentieth century. Konchalovsky is unafraid to let the painting be a painting. The palette is warm; browns, greens, yellows. There is a sense of the provisional, the tentative, in the way the paint is applied. The fruit themselves seem to have been caught mid-transformation. The brushstrokes are applied in thick dabs, creating a textured surface, which suggests the roughness and imperfections of the fruit. Look how he paints the shadows, they are not just areas of darkness, but full of greens and yellows, a playful way of acknowledging the way colour works in the real world, where everything is reflected. You might think of Cezanne and the way he also wrestled with painting fruit, but where Cezanne is a kind of geometric meditation, Konchalovsky is a bit looser and more fun. Painting is an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time. And like any good conversation, it embraces ambiguity, always happy to admit that there is never just one interpretation.