Landscape with Figures 1977

Roy Lichtenstein made this 'Landscape with Figures' with oil and magna on canvas. He painted it flat, like a sign. The way he uses colour is so bold and schematic, right? It's like he's got a pre-set palette. Look at the way he uses those Ben-Day dots, turning them into a kind of texture. It's all so deliberate. There’s a real tension between the flat surface and the illusion of depth, or, like, emotion in the figure with the tear. That red dot pattern is so key to his language. It's not just decoration. It speaks to the industrialization of image-making and print, and yet, there’s something so human about the imperfect application. It relates to Fernand Léger's work, but where Léger was all about celebrating the machine age, Lichtenstein seems more like he’s critiquing it, or maybe just playing with it. It's a painting, but also a comment on painting. It is both and neither, all at once.