Untitled
circa 1974
What could this be?
Maybe it is the profile of a hippo's head. The shininess of the impasto makes the animal's skin look
wet, as if it has just emerged from water. Its right ear is accentuated
with thick, fairly concentric swirls of oil paint that lead into the high jaw
bone, with a blob of opaque black to mark the centre of the ear. If this is a
hippo it must be a baby, or at most an adolescent, as its over-sized ear and pudgey
snout suggest young age.
From the ear we are
led into a plane of roughly-applied red which composes the hippo's
right cheek and lower jaw. Above this are two black lines that cut deeply into a layer of
teal-coloured paint, the shorter line acting like a closed eyelid and the
longer one stretching to the snout and curving under the top lip, suggesting a
wide nostril. The grey brushstrokes underneath clearly define a roundness
coherent with that of a hippo's chin. The animal's shoulders are teal and taut, with the
highlights of a light green suggesting an unseen light source.
A strong quality of
this painting, perhaps the strongest of all, is that it is secretive. It
imprints various images in peoples' minds, each radically different from one to
the next, without revealing its true form. While its medium is heavy and
loud this painting nevertheless speaks a language that is silent; it uses
visual communication to ask us what we see, to make us doubt ourselves, and as
a result we become confused. In asking, "Is that really what I see?",
we inherently become open-minded, and in the end we may conclude that the artist painted something very strange.
As a matter of fact, could this be a rouged hippo smelling the likes of a
huge raw artichoke?
