Landscape at Ceret 1913

Juan Gris painted this landscape at Ceret with oil on canvas, and what strikes me is how he’s piecing together the world. It's like he’s not just painting what he sees, but how he thinks about seeing. Look at the way he uses color: the pink hill with those almost polka-dot trees. It’s not about realism, but about building a feeling, a structure. He's using flat planes of color to create depth and form. The surface has a kind of matte quality, which flattens the image, almost like a poster. But then, within each section, you see the brushstrokes, the hand of the artist. It’s a dance between flatness and depth, abstraction and representation. This reminds me a little of Cezanne, who was also trying to figure out how to rebuild the world on canvas. Both invite us to see the world not as a fixed image, but as a process, a constant construction.