Abriès c. 1912

John Singer Sargent’s "Abriès" is a watercolor that captures a rustic interior with an incredible sense of light. You can see how the washes flow and bleed, creating these soft, luminous shadows that give the architecture a kind of ghostly presence. Looking at the base of the structure, there is a sort of ground made up of layered blues and browns, with a smattering of pale green, this creates the sense of an exterior space that has now made its way inside. It’s a very open, porous way of painting, where everything feels connected. The whole structure seems to hover between being there and not being there. Sargent was a master of this kind of suggestive painting, where the medium itself seems to participate in the creation of the subject. Think of someone like Gerhard Richter, who used squeegees to create blurred, ambiguous surfaces. Both artists remind us that painting is always a process of discovery, and that the most interesting art often embraces uncertainty and change.