Attica Landscape 1920

Konstantinos Maleas made this landscape of Attica with oil paint, and its all about the pleasure of applying paint to a surface. The color palette is muted, almost desaturated, like looking at a memory. What strikes me is how the material quality of the paint is so present. You can see the strokes, the way he loaded the brush and dragged it across the surface, especially in the foreground where the road curves. It’s not about illusionism, but about the reality of painting. Look at the trees, for instance. They’re not trying to fool you into thinking they’re real trees. They’re just these globs and smears of green and grey that somehow, through some kind of magic, evoke the idea of a tree. It reminds me a bit of Cezanne, who was also interested in breaking down forms into their essential components and building them back up with paint. It’s this idea of painting as a process of discovery, of finding new ways to see and represent the world around us, and that is always unfinished.