Untitled 1953

This Untitled painting is by Guido Molinari, but who knows when it was made? You can tell Molinari was interested in the physical stuff of paint, the way you can trowel it on and build up a crazy surface, like frosting a cake. Looking closely, you can see how he used a brush almost like a spatula, dragging and pushing the paint around. The colors are wild – reds, yellows, greens, and blues all fighting for space, and the texture is bumpy and uneven, and really alive. See that swirl of green near the top right, how it kind of dives down and then shoots back up? It reminds me of an eel in a coral reef, slippery and electric. It feels like he's throwing everything at once, embracing the mess and the joy of just smearing paint around. It reminds me a bit of Joan Mitchell, another artist who wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty and let the paint do its thing. In the end, it's not about perfection but about the energy and the feeling.