Envol 1974

This 'Envol' by Alexander Calder, was made with gouache on paper and it feels like a playful experiment with colours and shapes. There's a real sense of the hand in this work, in the way the lines wobble and drip, and the colours sometimes bleed outside their boundaries. I love the contrast between the flat, graphic shapes and the way the paint behaves, with all its little imperfections. Look at the red blobs and how they contrast with the black. It makes me think about the nature of the material that Calder’s using; its thickness, its opacity and how this relates to the emotional experience of the piece. The orange blobs that feel like they are weeping down the canvas. It makes me think of Joan Miro, another artist who embraced chance and improvisation. It’s all about embracing ambiguity and the multiple interpretations that come from that.