Komplementär-Relation I 1973

Camille Graeser made this blocky, bold painting, called Komplementär-Relation I, out of confident and colourful stripes. I can just imagine Graeser considering each stripe in relation to the others, pushing and pulling the composition, deciding on that big red block, sitting just above that cool blue. It's easy to think of geometric painting as super-rational, but these colours are emotional! It’s like he’s building this structure, a bit like a landscape, but he’s also feeling his way through it, thinking, “How can I make these colours sing together, what if I put this next to that?” He was really committed to the idea of concrete art, but I bet he was still inspired by his peers, like Josef Albers playing with colour theory, or Piet Mondrian stripping painting back to its bare bones. It’s all one big conversation, right? And that dialogue never ends. We can keep looking and interpreting these forms and colours, and they'll keep talking back to us.