Beatrice perdue 1953

Wolfgang Paalen painted "Beatrice Perdue" in 1953, and I love how the colours here just seem to bubble up from somewhere deep inside. It feels like an act of excavation. There’s a real physicality to this piece. You can see the brushstrokes, the way he’s layered the paint to give it texture, creating this kind of visceral, almost sculptural presence. Look at the way he's defined the forms of the body through these emphatic black outlines. It's almost cartoonish, and yet they create a real sense of depth and three-dimensionality. This kind of drawing with the brush really animates the surface of the painting. Paalen clearly owes a debt to the Surrealists, but there's something else going on here too. Like the German Expressionists, he’s trying to tap into something primal, something that goes beyond the surface of things. It reminds me of a later work by Philip Guston. It feels like a conversation between artists across time, each trying to get at something just out of reach.