Composition 1952

Serge Poliakoff made this painting sometime in the mid-20th century. It’s oil paint, and the way he builds up these color areas feels like a real process of layering and adjusting. You can see the materiality of the paint here, it's thick in places, and kind of scrubbed on. The surface is really important in how we read these shapes. Look at the way the dark blue almost seems to swirl, like he’s pushing the paint around, whereas the white feels more like it’s been applied with a drier brush. That small red shape, like a little flag, seems to vibrate against the pale ground because of its color. There's an awkwardness here, but it works, right? Poliakoff is often compared to Nicolas de Staël, another painter who worked with these kinds of blocky forms. It’s almost like they're having a conversation across canvases and time, each figuring out their own puzzle of color and shape. These aren’t meant to be definitive statements, but invitations to keep looking and thinking.