Work.At21 1969

Funasaka Yoshisuke made this piece called 'Work.At21' at some point in his life. He was born in 1939, so we can imagine him in his prime when he made this. I see the ghost of a grid, or maybe a matrix for something still unformed, surrounded by splashes of colour. You know, it makes me think of a silkscreen print, with those flat, slightly translucent colours hugging the edges of the image. I wonder what Funasaka was thinking about when he made this? Maybe he was playing with how colours push against one another, or how a simple structure can contain endless possibilities. That soft yellow, for example, isn't it juicy? And that stripe of colour on the right, a little bit pink, a little bit blue, feels like it’s just been swiped on. Looking at this reminds me that painting is a form of call and response—artists talk to each other across time and space, through marks, gestures, and colours.