July 21 1955

Boris Margo made this untitled painting, July 21st, probably with oil on canvas, and it’s all about the push and pull of dark and light. Look at the way he scrapes and drags the paint – you can almost feel the grit of the pigment under the brush. It's like he's building up layers of memory, each stroke a fragment of something seen or felt. I’m drawn to the bottom right of the canvas, where the paint thins out and you see these little orange glows peering through. Are they windows? Are they reflections? It’s hard to say, and I think that’s the point. Margo isn’t interested in giving us easy answers, he's trying to show us a world in flux, where things are always shifting and changing. Margo was into Surrealism and Expressionism, but I think he was also looking at artists like Kandinsky, who were trying to find a language for the invisible. This painting is about the challenge of trying to capture the uncapturable.