Untitled 1967

This "Untitled" piece by Conrad Marca-Relli, is all about the materiality of painting, or maybe not painting? The thing that grabs me about it is how Marca-Relli combines these industrial-looking shapes with a stark, almost severe palette of silvers and blacks. It’s like he's welding together different planes of thought, and yet, there's something so vulnerable about it. Notice the way the silver paint is applied, it has these subtle striations, almost like the grain of wood, and how they interact with the flat, matte black background. It's this tension between the industrial and the handmade that gives the piece its charge. Those little screws holding the shapes together? Genius! They bring an element of raw construction to what could otherwise be just another abstract composition. Marca-Relli reminds me a little of Kurt Schwitters in his use of found materials, but with a cooler, more detached sensibility. Ultimately, I think he invites us to see painting not just as representation, but as a kind of physical, even architectural, construction.