Memories of a Night 1911

Luigi Russolo painted *Memories of a Night* with oil paint applied in short brushstrokes of blue, yellow and brown to create a dreamlike image. The thick impasto builds the texture and the luminosity of the scene with a kind of feverish intensity. Look closely at the way Russolo layers the paint. See how a spectral figure seems to emerge from the darkness at the top, with the ghostly figures near the bottom. These marks are like afterimages that float and shift in the dark. I wonder about the artist, did he mean for us to see these visions or are they simply the detritus of his process? Like a half-remembered dream, we can never be certain about what Russolo was trying to convey, only that he was reaching for something beyond the surface. Much like Edvard Munch, Russolo seems to show us the inner life of his mind, the terror, the ecstasy and the melancholy.