Chateau Noir 1905

Cézanne made this painting, Chateau Noir, with oil on canvas. Look at those brushstrokes! It’s like he's trying to build form with individual touches of paint, almost like mosaic tiles. I can imagine Cézanne standing in front of the landscape, squinting, trying to capture not just what he sees, but how he sees. The building itself is solid, but it’s also dissolving into the surrounding landscape. Are those greens and blues leaves, or air, or a bit of both? There's a really cool tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the illusion of depth. The way he layers those strokes, it's almost like he’s pushing the forms forward and backward at the same time. You can feel him thinking about what painting is, what vision is, how to translate a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Like he’s having a conversation with painting itself.