At midday 1947

Pyotr Konchalovsky’s "At Midday" is, what else, an oil painting, a scene caught, perhaps, on a hot day! Look at the surface, at how the marks pool together; blobs of paint become leaves, dabs of brown and white give us cows. It’s like he’s showing us how vision itself works, assembling bits into wholes. The materiality of the paint is so present, you can almost feel the thickness of the strokes, the way they catch the light. There’s a passage right in the middle of the painting where you can see individual strokes of greens and yellows built on each other to describe the foliage, this for me is the key to the whole painting. Konchalovsky reminds me of some Cézanne's landscapes, where every brushstroke is a building block, an attempt to capture the world not as it is, but as we perceive it, always in motion, always incomplete. It's this embrace of process and ambiguity that makes art so endlessly compelling.