Aurora Volando 1933

Gerardo Dottori painted Aurora Volando with oil paint, and what strikes me is the way he's thinking about how to show the process of light emerging. The paint is pretty thin, and Dottori works with lots of smooth gradations from one shade of blue or green to the next. The way those colors shift and blend creates a sense of depth. When you look at the semi-circular shapes that stand for the sun's rays, you get the sense of how, in painting, a simple shape can be modulated to suggest atmosphere and movement. You know, like when you try to catch the exact hue of a shadow? The roofs of the buildings are a really interesting red, and that red jumps out from the greens and blues like a punctuation mark. To me, Dottori's work feels connected to someone like Lawren Harris, who painted those incredible, clear landscapes of the Canadian wilderness, but with an added touch of Italian Futurism in the way he breaks up the landscape into these dynamic, geometric forms. It's all about seeing and feeling the world in new, exciting ways.