Fontainebleau 1986

Curator: Standing before us is "Fontainebleau," a painting crafted by Endre Bartos in 1986. Editor: My goodness, what strikes me is that gorgeously textured sky, a deep sapphire impasto above this whimsical urban scene. It feels both brooding and playfully naive. Curator: Bartos really embraced the Fauvist spirit, wouldn't you say? The colours vibrate and there is that deliberate distortion of perspective. Consider, though, the materiality of Fauvism, this intentional clashing, that disrupted academic traditions and opened pathways for artists to use their craft to express subjective perspectives. Editor: Exactly! It’s as if he’s poured pure emotion onto the canvas. The red rooftops, the yellows, those peculiar lavender sidewalks... It almost tickles. I feel the echoes of Van Gogh, that emotional intensity expressed through paint application, the way he renders those layers. The layers of paint almost stand as small tiles... Curator: True, you sense those echoes. Think about oil paint in the 80's and the industry from which the paints were produced: The factories, transportation, how the paintings themselves end up entering into cycles of accumulation, speculation. And the brushstrokes have that certain energy— confident, brisk. This almost tactile surface certainly deviates from conventional landscape art. Editor: Yes, and the naiveté isn’t ignorance, it’s a conscious decision to sidestep conventional realism. To capture something…deeper, something closer to pure sensation. Perhaps Bartos captured not just the visible "Fontainebleau", but a personal Fontainebleau that shimmered within. I suppose, when you reflect upon this moment, he might simply be suggesting, through colour and texture, how truly magical the ordinary can become. Curator: That rings true. Art allows us to really dig deep into places we think we know so well. This piece is quite revealing in that way. It encourages us to investigate.