Carnival Figures 1952

"Carnival Figures" is a painting by Rene Portocarrero, and you can really see the artist working through the paint, scraping it back, building it up again. It’s all about the action. I love how Portocarrero teases out these figures from a murky background. The paint is thick, almost sculptural in places, like around the eyes of the central figure, giving them a piercing gaze. Look at the way he uses these dashes of green and red, they seem to flicker like lights on a fairground. The black lines that crisscross the canvas feel like a net, holding these fleeting visions together. There is a real tension between the chaos of the carnival and the underlying structure of the composition. I can’t help but think of Francis Bacon when I see this, that same sense of the figure emerging from the void. For me, this painting is all about the joy and the anxiety of seeing, of trying to capture something that is always just out of reach.