Nature Morte 1922

María Blanchard made this still life painting, Nature Morte, with oils in a Cubist style. It's a playful composition where the objects are reduced to their most basic forms. The colours are muted, mainly greys and browns, which adds to the feeling that she is thinking through form over trying to represent reality. What gets me about this painting is the surface. The paint is applied in thick, visible strokes. You can almost feel the artist’s hand moving across the canvas, building up the image layer by layer. Take the carafe in the background, how it emerges out of a series of vertical lines. It is not just about depicting a carafe, but about the physical act of painting itself, how the paint sits on the canvas and interacts with light. I see traces of Cézanne, in her commitment to the process of painting, and the way the final image emerges out of this struggle to find form. It’s this sense of uncertainty, this openness to the unexpected, that makes it so compelling.