Palimpsesto 1957

Modest Cuixart’s Palimpsesto seems to be made with oil, and maybe some mixed media – it’s hard to say exactly without getting up close and personal. The painting's surface is a fiery landscape of reds and oranges, built up with layers of texture. You can see how the layers create an almost topographic map of the artist’s process. The scribbled handwriting dances across the surface, partly obscured and partly revealed. In the lower-right corner, a dense thicket of words pushes against the thinly washed ground, as if a secret language is trying to break through. It’s like Cy Twombly and Antoni Tàpies got together and had a love child. Cuixart reminds us that art is about revealing and concealing, a constant push and pull between what is seen and what is felt.