I Know a Street (from the Oniro series) 1997

Vasile Dobrian made this print, called "I Know a Street," sometime in the twentieth century. It’s all blocks of colour and simple shapes - earthy greens and browns, a pale yellow that’s almost white, and a little pop of red. I can imagine Dobrian in his studio, carefully inking the block, pressing it onto the paper, and peeling it back to reveal this image. It makes me think about the act of reduction, taking a scene down to its bare essentials. The dark line going up the middle – is that the street? And then the yellow horseshoe on top – a building? An archway? Or even a sun! The longer I look, the more it reminds me of early modernists like Marsden Hartley, who were all about finding the underlying geometry of the world. And you know, that’s what painting is all about. It’s artists having a conversation across time. It’s a way of seeing, thinking, and experiencing the world.