Edmondson #1 1956

Lolo Soldevilla made this painting, "Edmondson #1", with what looks like oil on canvas, and it’s got this wonderfully simple, almost childlike quality. You can see a real sense of process in the way she's built up the surface. What grabs me is the texture—it's not just flat paint. There’s a real materiality to it, like she’s been pushing the paint around, maybe even adding stuff to it. The way the blue rectangle just sits there, kind of solid and dense, and then you have the circle, which seems almost weightless in comparison. Look how the surface of the circle is marked with the gestures of the brush, small striations and a layered build up of paint. This piece reminds me a bit of some of the early abstract expressionists, like Agnes Martin, who were also trying to distill painting down to its most essential elements. But Soldevilla brings her own unique sensibility to it. It's like she's saying, "Here are the basic shapes, the basic colors, now you make sense of it." And that's what makes art so endlessly fascinating.