Glass and Newspaper 1917

Juan Gris painted this oil on canvas, Glass and Newspaper, and it’s all about the way he layers colour and form to play with your perspective. It's like he's handing you the ingredients and daring you to mix them up. Look closely and you can see the texture, smooth in some spots, with subtle brushstrokes suggesting a slow build up. There’s a grey squiggle in the middle that could be anything, but to me, it’s the handle of the glass. It acts like a bridge, connecting the geometric shapes. The letters emerge and recede, giving the illusion of depth, but the flat picture plane reminds us it’s all just a constructed game. Gris plays with pictorial space in a similar way to Picasso, another artist playing with perspective, but here, Gris' muted palette gives it a quieter, more contemplative feeling, like he is thinking and feeling his way through painting. There’s no one way to look at this, and that's exactly the point.