Untitled 1959

This painting, created in 1954 by Enrique Grau, uses familiar materials – paint on board – yet it’s anything but conventional. Grau seems to have applied the pigment rapidly, perhaps even impatiently. The image is built up from loosely defined planes of color, with a striking use of geometric forms. Consider the way Grau has approached his media, disrupting any sense of seamless realism. There’s a clear tension between the figurative subject and the abstract vocabulary he employs. It takes great skill to make a work like this look so effortless. The casual paint application draws our attention to the artist’s hand. It also acknowledges a certain artistic lineage, nodding to European modernists like Picasso and Léger. But Grau gives the visual language a distinct inflection, a subtle Colombian accent. This work reminds us that the meaning of any artwork depends on the dialogue between material, making, and context.