Untitled 1971

Luchita Hurtado made this untitled painting using careful applications of flat, smooth color, creating a series of contrasts which play with perception. The tomato, a huge orb of red, hangs weightlessly against a black and white zig-zag, grounded, bizarrely, by what looks like a fleshy sand dune. Up close you can see the slight variations in color on the tomato’s surface: the almost imperceptible gradations of light that give it volume. The desert-like form at the base is equally perplexing, like some kind of trick of the light. Hurtado reminds me of someone like Agnes Martin, in that she uses a sparse visual vocabulary to create subtle but profound shifts in the way we see and understand the world. It's not just about what you see, but how you see it. And isn’t that what art is all about?