Untitled 1992

Antonio Palolo made this untitled painting with broad strokes and splatters of paint, mostly in hues of purple and white. I can imagine him standing over the canvas, maybe on the floor, letting the paint drip and pool in unpredictable ways. I feel the artist experimenting with a system, those vertical bands, but breaking it up with that drippy, spontaneous gesture! It reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter’s squeegee paintings, or even some of those early Jasper Johns flag paintings, where the process of making becomes part of the image itself. The paint looks pretty thin, almost like watercolor, which gives it this airy, ephemeral feel. Those splatters though, they're like little explosions of energy, cutting through the surface. It is as if Palolo wanted to leave his mark on the canvas. Maybe he was thinking about the history of painting, about all the artists who came before him, and how he could add something new to the conversation? Artists, after all, we're all just talking to each other through our work, across time and space.