Detektiv 1916

Josef Capek made this painting, titled ‘Detektiv’, using a limited palette of blues and ochres to create an enigmatic figure. The colours are muted, kind of hushed, but the forms are bold. I can imagine Capek building up the layers, the paint perhaps thin and washy in places, thicker in others, to give depth to the dark background and to make the ochre shapes luminous. The curves of the hat, the straight nose, and the single visible eye - these are all so simplified and reduced, almost like pictograms. There’s a real tenderness here. It is a bit like looking at a cubist painting. Capek, just like Picasso, was interested in the primitive and the way that different perspectives can be shown all at once. The face is cut up like it is being seen from multiple angles, while still giving you a sense of a person with an intensity of purpose. Paintings like this show me that art is an ongoing conversation and that, through their work, artists inspire one another across time. They embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, and welcome multiple interpretations and meaning, over any fixed reading.