La machine à privilèges 1964

Victor Brauner's 'La machine à privilèges' is a 1964 painting that feels like a playful experiment with form and color. The shapes are flattened and simplified, like cut-outs pieced together, and the color palette, with its earthy reds and browns against the cool blues and pinks, creates a strange, dreamlike vibe. It’s all very intuitive. There’s a physicality to the paint application, too. You can almost see the hand of the artist moving across the canvas, deciding where to lay down each stroke. Look at the way the red circle overlaps the figure's torso, it’s not quite centered, which gives the whole composition a sense of imbalance, like a precarious balancing act. It makes me think of Philip Guston, especially his later works, where he embraced a similar kind of raw, unapologetic expression. Ultimately, this painting is not about providing answers but about raising questions and embracing the messy, contradictory nature of human experience.