The King of cards 1927

Fernand Léger made *The King of Cards*, a painted oil on canvas, and it's now at the Musée National Fernand Léger in France. Léger’s paintings are like visual machines, carefully calibrated but with a playful spirit, that feels very contemporary. Here, the colours are grounded: ochre, brown, black and white, with jolts of electric blue. This makes the painting feel very grounded, yet surreal. I love the way that Léger combines a range of different pictorial languages - geometric abstraction, elements of figuration - and the way the painting becomes a meditation on these different vocabularies. Look at the squiggly lines in the bottom-right corner, which imply a cluster of fruit. The way that these marks are playful and loose makes me think of Picasso, who was a fellow innovator of new languages of painting. Ultimately this is a really interesting piece that celebrates the ongoing conversation between artists and their works.