Composition 1952

This is one of those paintings by Serge Poliakoff that seems to build itself up from simple shapes in blues, whites, reds, and yellows. It’s all rectangles and triangles, a mosaic of color. Looking at the heavy textures, I can imagine him in the studio, pushing paint around, maybe adding some medium, trying to make it sit just so. It's like he's building a wall, but the wall is an idea. I wonder what he was thinking about when he made this. Was he thinking about color theory, or just feeling his way through it? I see a certain gesture repeating, like a signature, a way of holding the brush, or maybe a certain kind of pressure. Poliakoff seems to be in conversation with other painters who play with hard-edged abstraction. It makes me think about Mondrian, or maybe even some of the early American modernists. These kinds of painting are like a big, ongoing conversation, with each artist adding their own voice to the mix. It’s all part of this beautiful, messy, human attempt to figure things out.