Untitled 1955

Charles Lapicque made this oil on canvas painting sometime in the 20th century, using materials readily available to artists of his era. The visible brushstrokes and the way Lapicque applies the paint have a lot to say. The paint is applied wet-on-wet, directly onto the canvas surface, capturing a moment of the artist’s own making. There is an immediacy here, a sense of being present in the act of painting. The thick application of paint adds a tactile quality to the image, almost sculptural in its effect, and the colours are allowed to bleed into one another. Lapicque was trained as a scientist, and this painting shows him thinking about the material reality of vision. He wanted to engage with how we see, and how the brain assembles information into an image. It’s a reminder that even something as straightforward as paint can be used to investigate what it means to be human.