Crowds 1970

Alekos Kontopoulos made this painting, Crowds, with an inky palette and bold gestural marks that feel both deliberate and accidental. You can imagine him working on this piece, building up layers, scraping back, and then adding more, searching for the balance between figuration and abstraction. I wonder if Kontopoulos was thinking about urban alienation when he made this painting. The brushstrokes seem to capture the feeling of being lost in a sea of faces. There are these figures, grayed out and anonymous, but then pops of red that could be anger or maybe just a bit of life trying to break through. The paint is thinly applied in areas, allowing the canvas to peek through, while in other spots, there is a thicker impasto, creating a tactile surface. That little burst of red near the shoulder, for example, feels almost like a wound. It reminds me of some of Philip Guston’s later figurative work where the personal and the political collide in these gnarly, expressive forms. Painters are always riffing off each other, you know, picking up a thread here and there. It’s a never-ending conversation across time.