Composition A XXI 1925

László Moholy-Nagy made this painting, Composition A XXI, sometime in the first half of the 20th century with oil on canvas. There’s a real sense of precision here, and it’s interesting to think about how that clarity comes about through the act of painting. The canvas is this kind of warm, creamy colour, thinly painted, so that the other shapes seem to float on top of it. The surface is smooth, but look closely and you’ll see the subtle textures from the movement of the brush. Those crisp lines, the geometric shapes, the floating lines like scattered matchsticks, all seem really intentional, yet I wonder if there was an element of chance involved. Take that red circle, for example. It’s not perfect, not mathematically precise, it's got some blemishes in it, some interesting shifts in tone. It makes me think of Malevich and the Suprematists, but also anticipates a lot of hard-edged abstract painting that came later. It’s as if painting is a language where we endlessly revisit the same questions, to see what new shapes they might take.