Composition 1922

This is Janos Mattis-Teutsch’s “Composition,” made with what looks like oil paint. There’s a kind of exploratory feeling to how the colors and shapes meet; you get the sense that he's really feeling his way through it. The texture, especially in that pinkish-white area up top, is gorgeous – almost like a creamy impasto, built up with layers. The red background is doing a lot of work here. See how it bleeds around the central figure, creating this halo effect, blurring the boundaries. And then there’s that bold black line cutting diagonally across, holding everything in tension. Mattis-Teutsch was part of a circle interested in spirituality and abstraction, and you can see that here. His work reminds me a bit of Kandinsky, both artists searching for ways to express inner landscapes through pure form and color. But where Kandinsky can feel intellectual, Mattis-Teutsch feels more raw, more immediate. It's like he’s inviting us into the messy, beautiful process of making itself.