The Return to the Playgrounds of Youth 1924

Nils Dardel made this strange and wonderful painting called The Return to the Playgrounds of Youth with thin paint and what looks like coloured pencil. Look at that sky—streaks of blues and pinks that feel both dreamy and a little unsettling. It’s like the whole scene came together through intuition, a shifting puzzle of memory and imagination. Dardel's got a lot going on. There’s a figure standing on someone’s shoulders! It reminds me of some of Ensor’s more wild compositions. I feel like Dardel is trying to remember something—a moment, a feeling—and it keeps slipping away, becoming stranger in the process. The colours are washed out and surreal, the perspective is all over the place, like he’s piecing together fragments of a dream. And, that’s what artists do, right? We try to capture these fleeting images and feelings, knowing they’ll always remain a bit out of reach. We’re all just talking to each other across time, inspiring each other to keep searching.