Self-Portrait 1952

Editor: This is Max Gubler's "Self-Portrait" from 1952, an oil painting. It strikes me as quite raw and intense. What is your interpretation of this work, especially considering its expressive style? Curator: Observe the composition. The planes of the face are rendered through aggressive strokes, dissecting the image. Color becomes structure: see how the reds around the eyes and cheeks build both form and a feverish affect? The ground itself seems destabilized, built of layered marks that defy the eye’s impulse toward resolution. Do you notice how the clothing becomes pure brushwork? Editor: I do, the brushstrokes in the shirt are very prominent and seem almost detached from representing fabric. It makes me wonder about the artist’s emotional state during painting. Curator: Quite right. Emotional states may be apprehended only insofar as they are encoded within the materiality of paint and the structure of representation. Consider how the painting shatters a cohesive, legible image; what results is the affect of psychological fragmentation performed through material and pictorial construction. Is that fragmentation itself an emotional state? Editor: So you are suggesting it's less about what the artist felt and more about how those feelings manifest in the actual paint and form? Curator: Precisely. The formal elements--the application of pigment and disruption of cohesive space-- become paramount. It is about seeing those fractures of representation *as* emotional and psychological spaces, more than represent*ing* something directly from within. Editor: That shifts my perspective completely. I see the rawness as part of the medium, not just the mood. Thanks, I will see the work from now on as a play of color and shapes to find a new kind of form. Curator: A productive insight. We gain further understanding when the materials and their arrangement lead our interpretations.