Images 1974

Alekos Kontopoulos made this painting "Images" with oil on canvas, and what I see are fields of grey, ochre and muted colours, punctuated by small accents of red and strokes of white. I imagine the artist standing before the canvas, brush in hand, maybe stepping back, squinting, then stepping forward again, adding another layer, another stroke, a red dot, almost like a playful afterthought. I feel a sense of quiet contemplation, the kind of searching that happens in the studio, when it’s just you, the canvas, and the ghosts of all the painters who came before. It reminds me a little bit of what Guston was doing, that search for a new kind of form. It’s about the materiality of paint, its textures and its capacity to evoke feeling and emotion. You know, painting is an ongoing conversation, and each artist is responding to what they’ve seen and experienced, trying to push the language of painting forward. So much can be communicated through gesture, and each mark is a record of an idea, a feeling, a moment in time.