Still Life with Fruits 1989

Petros Malayan made this unnamed still life with fruit, and well, it's an invitation to a feast of the senses, isn't it? It’s all about the process, you can almost feel Malayan working quickly to capture the fleeting moment of the fruit. Look at the texture! The surface is alive with the movement of the brush. It feels like he was really present in the making. The edges of the plates are smudged, they blend with the fruit, making a kind of ambiguous space where things are really alive. Then the lines themselves are kind of shaky, which gives it a really vulnerable, almost clumsy, but beautiful feel. It makes me think of Morandi, an Italian painter, who also painted a lot of still lifes, but in a very different way: sparse, quiet. Here, it's kind of the opposite, loud, messy, alive! It is the joy of painting that comes through.