Orange is Day 1979

Emerson Woelffer constructed "Orange is Day" out of torn paper in 1999, and the rawness of the medium here is just wonderful. It’s not about hiding the seams, it’s about exposing the making. The color palette is so key. The way he plays the brown-gray against the solid, blocky blue and then pops it with that square of scarlet. It feels immediate, intuitive, and yet there's this underlying formal structure holding it all together. What gets me, though, is the physicality of the torn edges. They’re like little rebellious marks, disrupting the otherwise clean geometry of the composition. I think the rip between the brown and gray is so interesting. It’s like a horizon line, but also a wound. Art-making is like an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time, and this piece has hints of Matisse’s cut-outs, but then goes somewhere entirely new. For me, "Orange is Day" is a reminder that sometimes the simplest gestures can be the most powerful.