Organismo umano 1929

Enrico Prampolini made Organismo umano with oil on canvas sometime in the early 20th century, and right away, the way he’s working with color here feels kind of bodily, doesn’t it? I mean, look at that thick red, edged with white, that gives way to a dark, almost bruised blue-black. It's not a passive observation, it's like he’s trying to get under the skin of what it means to be alive. The surface texture is pretty smooth, so it’s not so much about layering and building up, but more about the push and pull of these colors against each other. It's like he's digging for something under the surface, a kind of emotional excavation. Take the black circle, for instance, sitting there in the red like a void, or maybe a cell. Is it a part of the whole or separate from it? That ambiguity is what makes it so alive for me. You might see something similar in the work of Francis Picabia, a similar interest in the mechanistic body, and the absurdity of the human condition. These are paintings that ask more questions than they answer.