Je les ai deviné trop souvent au fond de l'eau 1969

This canvas by Theo Gerber has these ghostly blues and fleshy pinks, like he’s dug down into some hidden, watery place. It's like he’s conjuring this strange realm, pushing paint around to see what might surface. You can almost feel him there in the studio, right? Maybe he’s staring at the canvas, squinting, trying to coax some form out of the chaos. I bet he mixed up a big pile of blues and then, bam!, he started swirling it around, letting the shapes emerge. There’s this one gesture – this snaking blue line that kind of loops around – I wonder if that’s meant to be a river, or maybe a thought that keeps circling back. Gerber seems to be in conversation with artists like Gorky and Matta; this painting could be a surrealist dreamscape. Ultimately, paintings like this remind me that art is an ongoing dialogue between artists, a sharing of ideas across time. And that painting, with its ambiguities and uncertainties, allows for so many different ways of seeing and experiencing the world.