Umbria vergine 1949

Gerardo Dottori’s "Umbria vergine" is a landscape where the paint is laid on with an almost obsessive, repetitive touch, building up this fantastical version of the natural world. The materiality here is everything – you can almost feel the rhythm of the brushstrokes mimicking the rolling hills. The layers of blue and green give depth, but there's also something slightly unreal about the consistency of the marks, like a dream you can almost grasp but it remains just out of reach. Look at the way each little green ‘tree’ is carefully placed. It’s like a meditation, a slow, methodical process that creates this weird, hypnotic effect. Dottori reminds me a little of someone like Agnes Martin, in the way that the repetition of marks creates a kind of spiritual or transcendent space. It's art that embraces ambiguity, offering a space for reflection.