Two Paintings 1984

Roy Lichtenstein made 'Two Paintings' and it's like he's having a conversation with himself, or maybe with art history itself. I can almost feel him working on this, carefully placing each block of color and line. In the top half, the shapes butt up against each other, interlocking like a puzzle but somehow still separate. Then there's that stripe, slicing the canvas in two, dividing the upper abstract shapes from the lower one. The bottom painting is like a distorted portrait, framed within the larger composition. And the Ben-Day dots! They're so iconic of Lichtenstein, but here they feel almost subversive, like he's questioning the very nature of representation. What was he thinking, putting these two worlds together? Maybe he's asking us if we can hold two ideas in our head at once. It reminds me of other artists who play with representation and abstraction like Picabia. It’s like one long game of telephone!