Still Life with Fruit Bowl 1918

Juan Gris made this painting, Still Life with Fruit Bowl, with oil on canvas, and it's this amazing puzzle of angles and light. The muted palette with those flashes of orange and the bold dark lines, it's like he's not just painting objects, but also the spaces in-between. I love how Gris builds up the image through layers of opaque paint, creating all these fragmented shapes, like the newspaper that peeks out from beneath the fruit bowl. It's not about tricking the eye, it's about deconstructing reality and reassembling it in a way that feels both familiar and utterly strange. Look closely at the way he renders the shadows. It's clear that Gris is more interested in how we see, than what we see. I'm reminded of Cezanne, but with a touch more of the modern world creeping in. It’s a reminder that art is always in conversation, a back-and-forth across time.