Flowers of the Universal Flowering 1916

Pavel Filonov made this painting, Flowers of the Universal Flowering, and honestly, I have no idea when! It is a garden of faceted forms and colours, like everything's been cut with a knife and reassembled. Look closely and you can see how he builds up the image with tiny strokes and dabs of paint. The surface is a mosaic of texture, an amazing combination of opaque and transparent layers. Take the flower heads near the top; they're built up with little blocks of red, pink and white, giving them a kind of pulsating energy. Filonov was into this idea of "analytical realism," which sounds very serious, but it seems like he’s just breaking everything down into its constituent parts, a bit like early Cubism, or even some of the Italian Futurists, who wanted to represent movement and change. He really takes it to another level though, right? It’s a pretty wild ride.