Untitled 1987

This painting by Manoucher Yektai is an absolute fest of loaded brushstrokes and confident marks. The ivory white and stone grays have been layered on thick. I can imagine him standing here, brush in hand, circling and daubing, excavating the scene from the material. He has a conversation with the painting and the painting talks back, each move is a question, a response, an intervention. The paint is so thick, and the marks are so sure, they feel like a kind of bold relief. Look how he applies dollops of paint to create those strong rectangular forms, like columns, or emphatic borders. They remind me a little of Guston’s late work or maybe Auerbach's structures. Yektai feels like he’s in dialog with all of them. Painting can do that, open up conversations across time, across space. It's an exchange of ideas, a play of forms that keeps echoing and evolving. Painting embraces ambiguity and uncertainty; there are infinite possibilities in its fluid language.