Ibdes in Aragon 1935

Andre Masson made this painting, Ibdes in Aragon, with washes of color, somewhere between brown, red and yellow. Imagine him making it, maybe in one shot, or maybe he labored over it, adding thin layer upon thin layer. I look at the roosters, and it makes me wonder: was he thinking of some mythic narrative? There’s something theatrical about the way the yellow space meets the horizon, and the snowy mountains in the background create a feeling of distance. The thinness of the paint gives it all a kind of transparency, and the buildings remind me of the Southwest, especially Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of the desert. There is an urgency to the scene and yet the painting has a certain lightness, a looseness to the brushwork. Maybe the roosters are having a conversation? Whatever it is, painters have been in dialogue with one another for centuries, riffing off each other’s ideas. We keep the conversation going.