Aldeia Russa 1918

Lasar Segall’s ‘Aldeia Russa’ is a dreamlike scene rendered with oil on canvas, a swirl of color, and abstracted form. I imagine Segall, brush in hand, building up the planes and textures of the painting, with the light hitting this colour, and then that. I can almost feel him working through the composition, puzzling over where to put the figures, how to angle the buildings. There's the sky, the earth, the people – all rendered in this angular way, like a Cubist had a baby with a folk artist. I love how the colours hum against each other, the orange against the green, that sky blue… I feel a lot of warmth towards the way Segall is handling paint, the materiality of it. Each stroke seems like a little decision, a little argument, a little love affair. As if he’s saying: this is how I see the world, not as a fixed thing, but as something always in motion, always becoming. We’re all in conversation together, across time.