Piazza Del Duomo 1909

Carlo Carra painted Piazza Del Duomo with oil on canvas using thick, choppy marks. The blue and yellow palette sings with complementary contrast, a harmonic discordance. There’s so much energy and movement across the surface of this canvas. It’s like a frenzy of sensation, chaos rendered with tiny strokes of pigment. Look how Carra uses the texture of the paint to create the illusion of light and shadow, how the ridges and valleys of impasto catch the light and create a sense of depth. The density of the marks obscures what’s there while also revealing it. There's a push and pull between abstraction and representation in this painting that reminds me of Van Gogh. Ultimately, Piazza del Duomo is not just a picture of a place but a record of a process, a testament to the transformative power of paint.