Huizen in een Italiaans dorp 1924

Leo Gestel's 'Houses in an Italian Village' unfolds in shades of grey, a landscape rendered through the subtle gradations of graphite on paper. It’s like the echo of a memory, a landscape distilled down to its most elemental forms. I imagine Gestel, charcoal in hand, stepping back and squinting to capture the way light and shadow dance across those stacked rooftops. There's a push and pull between geometric abstraction and the lived-in feel of a hillside town. The rough texture of the paper, the smudging and blending, all feel intentional, as though he’s trying to get at the heart of seeing, not just the surface of what’s there. I’m thinking about artists like Lyonel Feininger, who similarly played with light and structure. How artists, across time and place, keep circling back to the same questions. What is seeing? What is feeling? And how can these things be etched onto a surface? The act of drawing, the push and pull, opens up a space where seeing and thinking become one.