Mensaje N. 13, Deut. XXVII:17 1959

This is "Mensaje N. 13, Deut. XXVII:17" by Mathias Goeritz, and it's like a visual poem made of ochre hues and sharp vertical lines. It feels like it came into being through layering, where the artist might have been thinking about ancient messages, etched in stone. I can imagine Goeritz, mixing colors, adding the metallic shard, stepping back, and then adding more marks, kind of shifting the surface. The texture is thick, a kind of built-up impasto, giving it a tactile quality that makes you want to reach out and touch it. That silver shard, disrupts the grid, adding a touch of rawness, like a piece of the outside world crashing into the painting. Goeritz's broader practice often involved these sorts of geometric experiments and textural contrasts. You see echoes of painters like Antoni Tàpies, who were also working with rough surfaces and found materials. It’s about how artists are in an ongoing conversation, exchanging ideas. Painting is an embodied expression, allowing for endless interpretations.