Ovid Bather 2012

Chris Ofili made 'Ovid Bather' with what looks like watercolour or maybe gouache, judging from those delicious transparent layers. It's not about perfection; it’s about feeling the process, and it's not afraid to show it. The color is a trip! Greens, purples, reds, just swimming around, creating this figure that’s both there and not there. Look at the way the light hits the figure, almost like a mosaic. There's this sense of form dissolving into color. You get a sense of a person, the title tells us that, but actually the figure is really secondary to these washes and stains of color. It reminds me a little of Matisse, how he uses color to create form. There's a kind of freedom here, an invitation to lose yourself in the colors. It's like Ofili is saying, "Hey, let's just see what happens when we let the colors do their thing." And that's the kind of art I get excited about: ambiguous, evocative, and open to endless interpretation.