Jeux d'infants 1971

This is Dado’s “Jeux d'infants”, painted with what looks like oil on canvas. The title translates as “Children’s Games” but what a title doesn’t tell you is the feeling that comes from that brooding blue palette—it’s haunting. I can imagine Dado starting with thin washes of paint, almost like a stain, letting the forms emerge slowly through layers and revisions. See how the figures appear? Kind of ghostly, half-formed, caught in a web of something, like barbed wire. I can see that they’re in pain. Maybe this is Dado thinking about the games of war that adults play, using children as pawns. You can tell this because it’s a blue painting full of war and bodies but the colour is not the colour of war, it’s the colour of a children’s room: the pale blue walls, the colour of sadness, the colour of innocence, the colour of loss. And that painterly gesture where the artist paints a sad face can be seen in so many other painters like Goya. Artists are in a constant conversation like this. It reminds me of the way paintings often let go of fixed meanings. Instead, they embrace ambiguity and invite multiple readings.