Untitled 2000

Michel Majerus made this unnamed painting with acrylic on canvas, a mash-up of wild colors and text. I love how the ground of the painting shifts: here, stripes of turquoise and yellow; there, brushy strokes of red. I imagine Majerus in his studio, working fast, splashing paint on with abandon. He’s grabbing words and images from the world - "based out," "plant explosive device" - and layering them on, letting the painting become a collage of thought and feeling. The text, like a snippet of overheard conversation, brings a sense of the everyday into the abstract space of the painting. That big blue X cutting through the composition! It's almost as if he's trying to cancel everything out, start over. This guy knew how to keep the conversation going; he was in dialogue with so many other painters! And now, here we are, decades later, still riffing on what he started.