The Old Virgins Plodding through the Winter Garden in Arles 2011

This image, "The Old Virgins Plodding through the Winter Garden in Arles," was painted by Alexander Roitburd. It’s a space where representation kinda floats, am I right? The painting is dark, a black soup that things emerge from, like a dream. There is a strange luminosity to it, coming from the density of the black, throwing the other objects into stark relief. Then there's the sheep. It's painted in a traditional way, but is then placed next to a kind of weird anatomical drawing. These two things, which you wouldn’t normally see together, bounce off each other in a way that creates a really dynamic tension. Roitburd feels like a cousin to Philip Guston. They both have this really interesting way of taking the history of painting and turning it into something completely new, like a mad scientist in a lab. For Roitburd, meaning is always in motion.