Untitled 1996

Amilcar de Castro made this untitled painting with a brush and ink. The directness of the black marks, how they slice across the blank white space, reminds me that art is a doing, an action, a form of work. There's a beautiful awkwardness in the layering of forms here. Like, the black lines almost make a kind of window, but then that one red stripe insists on flatness, like a sign. It leans against the black lines, a bright contrast to the monochrome scheme. You can almost feel the weight of the painter's hand, the drag of the brush across the surface. See how the brushstrokes at the bottom of the window become almost vertical? This is where the artist seems to pause, or change direction, embracing the materiality of the medium itself. The rawness and energy of de Castro's work relates to artists like Franz Kline, who also worked with such immediacy. But where Kline’s work feels architectural, de Castro’s has a fragility and lightness, as if it could all fall apart at any moment. The painting feels like a question, an invitation, not a definitive statement.