Le Broc 1920

Juan Gris made this still life, Le Broc, with oil paint probably sometime in the 1920s, and the making looks like it was a process of working out how all the shapes fit together. I mean, look at how the brown of the jug is interrupted by the whiter paper, like a game of visual chess. It's all about relationships: the texture of the paint is mostly smooth, but the way Gris layers those slightly off-key browns and ochres gives it a real depth, right? It's like he's not just painting the objects but thinking about how they feel together. That pear, for example, lying at the bottom. The light catches it in a way that makes it almost glow against the flatter, more opaque areas around it. It gives me that same feeling I get from Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, where the colours and shapes get right under your skin, in a good way. Anyway, I think art is about seeing, feeling, and thinking, all at once.