La ville blanche 1953

Corneille made 'La ville blanche' with paint and a brush—though I wouldn't be surprised if a palette knife had been thrown in there, too! I wonder what it was like for Corneille to create this bird’s-eye view of a white city, a jumble of squares and rectangles rendered in thick white paint, punctuated by reds and blues. There’s an incredible tension between spontaneity and control. It's like he's wrestling with this idea of a city, letting it emerge and settle on the canvas through a series of intuitive gestures. The palette is so restrained, like a winter sky just before dawn, but the energy is anything but subdued. Look at that looping black line—is it a river? Or just a doodle that got a little carried away? Painting is often like a conversation. Artists riff off of each other’s ideas across time, adding their own unique voices to the mix. Like Karel Appel and the Cobra group, Corneille's paintings speak to a kind of liberated expression, where feeling trumps form and the act of painting is an adventure in itself.