Romanian Landscape 1941

Henri Catargi made this Romanian Landscape with oil paint, probably sometime mid-century. The painting feels rooted in a process, an ongoing conversation with the landscape itself. Look at the road, how it's built from these broad, blocky strokes of grey. There's a real materiality to it, you can almost feel the grit and dust under your feet. And the colours! That muted palette of greens and greys, punctuated by the ochre roofs in the distance, it creates a real atmosphere, heavy with humidity. The brushwork, though, is what really grabs me. See that zig-zag mark in the tree canopy? It's almost like a little cartoon, a shorthand for the complexity of nature. And the figure walking along the road, she's so simply rendered, yet she anchors the whole scene. Catargi reminds me a little of the American painter Milton Avery. He also had that gift for distilling a scene down to its bare essentials, for finding the poetry in the everyday. Both artists show us that painting is as much about feeling as it is about seeing.