Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue 1942

This is Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue,’ made with oil paint on canvas, but when? Who knows! I think of him constantly futzing with it, like an eternal process. I love the tension in the materiality here – the black lines are so present, forming the grid. And those blocks of color? They're not quite flat, are they? There's a touch of texture, a slight unevenness that suggests a human hand, a painterly touch. Look at that square of red – it almost feels like it's vibrating. It’s not just about color, but surface, presence. The composition feels like it is constantly shifting, the push and pull of the colours, the grid, always a new relationship. This interplay of order and imperfection, it reminds me a little of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings – a system, but with the variation of human execution. To me, it’s about how we make sense of the world – imposing structure, yet embracing the messy, the unpredictable.