The Last Selfie 2017

Alexander Roitburd made this painting, ‘The Last Selfie’, with oil on canvas. I can feel the artist's hand here, pushing and pulling, dragging wet paint. The gesture is almost violent, like a wilting flower. The color palette is restricted, brown hues give an end-of-times feel. It looks like he had fun wrecking what was probably a traditional landscape, and a traditional portrait, but not without a certain amount of feeling. I can see the ghost of Gerhard Richter here, one of those painters for whom the history of painting is always right there, on the canvas, sometimes literally smeared or blurred to obliterate the scene. I wonder what Roitburd was thinking when he made this? Was he angry, was he happy, did he feel alive? I hope so! I hope the process of painting kept him going. Artists work in a chain, responding to one another across the years. We use painting to express the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience.