Fred 1980

Henry Chalfant made "Fred," this photograph, capturing a painted subway car, and what grabs me is the sheer joy in its making. There's something about the bold color palette, the primary reds and yellows against the train's grey, that just shouts with a kind of untamed energy. Look at how the images of the soup cans are stacked, and the way that the words kind of tumble across the surface, each letter like its own little adventure. The artist isn't trying to trick you into thinking these are real soup cans; instead, they embrace the fact that these are marks on a surface, lines and colors coming together to create something new. In the middle there is this raw energetic scrawl where the artist is letting loose. The eye dances over the surface, tracing the lines, feeling the textures, and getting lost in the pure, unadulterated process of artmaking. It makes me think of artists like Basquiat, who also brought that raw, street-level energy into their work. It's like a conversation across time, each artist riffing off the other, pushing the boundaries of what art can be.