Composition 1937

Leo Leuppi made this painting called Composition in a palette of ochre, red, black, and white. Imagine him at work, the canvas flat, the body bending to get closer, pulling away, trying this, trying that. The painting feels almost architectural, like a blueprint. There are shapes that suggest figures, but they are reduced to lines, echoes of forms. I see a conversation happening here, a dialogue between flatness and depth, between the solid black shapes and the transparent white lines. Maybe Leuppi was thinking about the way we perceive space, how we construct it in our minds. Those red rectangles seem to hover in space, casting shadows, or maybe they are holes in the ground. It makes me think of the early modernists and their pursuit of pure form, of artists like Mondrian or Malevich. But there's something else here, too, something playful and off-kilter. It's like Leuppi is inviting us to join him in a game of visual hide-and-seek.