Still Life with Apples and Pears 1920

Curator: I’m immediately struck by the raw, almost clumsy, texture of the brushstrokes. There's a directness that's quite disarming. Editor: And that very quality underscores how Kmetty János, working around 1920, embraced modernist styles while deeply examining form and its inherent possibilities. What we are seeing here is "Still Life with Apples and Pears," executed in oil paint, presenting very quotidian subject matter in an innovative fashion. Curator: Innovative is a good word. It feels like the beginning of a conversation with the objects, not a pronouncement about them. You know, as if he’s figuring out their essence right there on the canvas. The background feels… unresolved, but not in a bad way? It pushes the foreground forward, creating this slightly anxious energy. Editor: The means of production and materiality tell us something too. Oil paint lends itself to layering, revising, a continuous cycle of shaping and reshaping – literally mimicking, as you observed, a painter’s search for essence. The angular shapes – both of the tableware and fruit – also remind us of architectural structure and concerns, as if even domestic life is being constructed by geometry and its materials. Curator: Geometry with a secret language! I find that those muted blues and greens sing of tranquility even amidst those strong shapes and defined forms. I imagine it in the artist’s studio, this peaceful, contained moment lifted directly from life but now vibrating with intent. There’s that beautiful balance between control and, let's say, a joyful abandon! Editor: Precisely. And looking closely, it's apparent Kmetty employed readily available materials - common oil paints applied with brushes across commercially prepared canvas – elevating mundane domesticity and manufactured color into something…transcendent is perhaps the word that you're seeking? Curator: Exactly! I feel like I want to pick one of those pears. A painting's ultimate success is when you feel pulled to inhabit it… don’t you think? Editor: And to disassemble the object, to question where it was made, by whom, to account for our modern obsession with, and consumption of, the image and fruit. A fitting final point. Thank you.