Boxmač 1915

Josef Capek’s ‘Boxmač’ is a tumbling dance of geometric figures in muted blues, reds and grays. It is a painting that looks like it came into being tentatively, as if trying on different shapes, discarding some, keeping others, until a composition emerges—or perhaps never fully emerges. You know, I can imagine Capek approaching the canvas with an open mind, open to the push and pull of forms, the way one shape can suggest another, the way colors can create depth and tension. The circles create a sense of movement, energy, of something about to topple. And those straight lines, those hard edges—they seem to offer a kind of resistance, a grounding force. It reminds me a little of Leger, but the softness of Capek’s palette softens the mechanization of Leger. It’s like they're all in conversation, these painters, across time and space. And we get to eavesdrop, to add our own voices to the mix. I think of painting as a form of embodied expression, which embraces ambiguity and uncertainty.