Girl with still life 1953

Rafael Zabaleta made this striking painting called Girl with Still Life, but when or where is a mystery. The colours are somehow muted and bright all at once, like folk art but with an edge. This is clearly a person who understands painting as a process, where the image emerges through layers of looking and adjusting. The paint is applied with a kind of bluntness that feels very deliberate, almost like he’s carving the image out of the canvas. Look at the way the light falls on the girl's face, how the planes are defined with these flat, opaque colours. And then there's the still life itself – the dead animals, the bird in the cage – it’s both brutal and tender, almost like a Spanish vanitas painting, reminding us of the fragility of life. That’s also reminiscent of Picasso, who did a lot of still life painting, and in particular you can see some similarities between the two artists approach to the use of flattening and perspective. Ultimately, Girl with Still Life embraces ambiguity, inviting us to ponder the many layers of meaning embedded within it.