L'appel du voyageur 1973

Theo Gerber made L’appel du voyageur with paint, I’m guessing oil, sometime before 1997. This painting feels like looking through a fractured telescope at a very strange planet. Huge landmasses rise on either side, rocky and marbled with strange sediment. They frame a sort of portal, a porthole, through which we see a distant land. I’m wondering if Gerber felt like he was constructing a dreamscape, like he was reaching for a place just out of grasp. The paint looks thin, maybe a little dry, so he might have worked on this over a long period, layering it up, letting it sit, coming back with fresh eyes. Look at the circle, the world within the world. It's a playful, childlike shape. I can imagine him carefully applying those rings of colour, trying to get it just right. Painters like Gerber are tapping into something primal, something about how we see and imagine the world. They’re in conversation with artists across time, building on each other’s visions, inspiring new ways of seeing. Each brushstroke is a gesture, a thought, an invitation to dream along with them.