Czobel Bela 1930 Paris Szent György Square 1930

This painting of Szent György Square in Paris was made in 1930 by Bela Czobel, and it's like a memory struggling to come into focus. The brushstrokes are restless, always moving, searching for the light. It’s an active surface, with dark lines weaving around the buildings, which, if you look closely, are rectangles, each one a different hue. What I really love is the texture – it's thick in some places and thin in others. The artist builds up the paint, scrapings of it almost, only to scrape it back down, as if to reveal the underpainting, creating a kind of see-through surface. It's all about the push and pull, the layering and scraping, like a conversation between colors. There's a real sense of movement here, a kind of controlled chaos, almost like you’re looking at a proto-Abstract Expressionist piece by someone like Joan Mitchell, maybe. It’s a reminder that art is always in conversation, a back and forth of ideas.