La Pipe A Eau. Chinoise 1952

Paul Jacoulet made this print, La Pipe A Eau. Chinoise, at some point during his career. The colours are just so, almost edible – like candied ginger, or those orange and lemon jellies you get in fancy sweet shops. I love the way the image is built up from flat planes of colour. There’s very little shading or modelling to trick you into thinking this is a real, three-dimensional space. It’s confident in its flatness. Take the brown of the sitter’s robe, it’s a kind of all-over, even tone that somehow manages to suggest folds and depth, purely through its placement next to the background colour. There’s a sense that Jacoulet is looking back to the woodblock prints of artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige. It’s easy to imagine him in conversation with the likes of someone like Matisse, too, who was also making work based on the interplay of shapes and colours. Ultimately art is an ongoing conversation, right? We are all just borrowing and stealing and rethinking what has gone before.