Excerpt (Riot) 2003

Julie Mehretu made this piece, Excerpt (Riot), with ink and graphite, and you can see the traces of the hand in every little mark. I love how she builds up these layers. It’s like she’s not just depicting a riot, but enacting one, right there on the paper. Look at the way she uses color. These thin washes of ochre and umber are punctuated by sudden shocks of red, like alarms, or maybe flares. The surface has a delicate, almost ephemeral quality to it. But then you notice these insistent black lines, cutting across the composition. It is so physical. Like a sculptor carving into stone. This tension between fragility and aggression is what makes the piece so compelling for me. There’s a sense of something being built up and torn down all at once. I think of Cy Twombly, with his scribbled, chaotic surfaces. Both artists embrace the messy, unresolved nature of artmaking, and of life itself.