Il Vicino Pianeta 1972

Antonio Corpora made "Il Vicino Pianeta" with oil paint, and it feels like he was really letting loose. The colours here are so bold - these big blocks of blue, yellow, and green are laid down with a kind of confident simplicity, but then scratched over with dark lines. I love how you can see the marks of the brush, like he wasn’t trying to hide the process at all. Look at the very top right corner, how the yellow has drips in it, it is such a nice reminder that paintings are built up by layers of applied colour. It's like he's building up a world, a kind of landscape, and then questioning it at the same time. In a way, this feels similar to the way Joan Mitchell used colour and gesture to create emotional landscapes, although Corpora has a distinctly Italian sensibility. Ultimately, "Il Vicino Pianeta" embraces that beautiful ambiguity that makes art so compelling.