La lune rousse 1958

Jean Bertholle made this abstract painting called 'La lune rousse', we don't know exactly when, but it's a wild arrangement of warm colors and peculiar shapes. I imagine Bertholle layering rectangles and circles, letting a reddish-brown moon emerge from the darkness. I get a sense of him, stepping back, squinting, adding a bit of teal here, a dab of yellow there. You can feel the process, right? The paint isn't trying to trick you into seeing anything specific, but the textures, the way the colors bump up against each other, it's all about feeling. Is it a landscape? A city? A dream? It reminds me of some of the early modernists like Picasso or Braque, who were also trying to break down the world into shapes and colors. It makes me wonder what he was chasing. That push and pull between seeing and feeling is where painting gets really interesting, don't you think? It’s this conversation between painters, across time, figuring out how to turn the world inside out and put it on a canvas.