Landscape 1983

Horia Bernea painted this landscape, but when or where is a mystery. It’s all greens and blues, a low-key, almost drab palette that somehow feels super alive. The way Bernea builds up the leaves with these tiny dabs and strokes, it’s like he’s not just painting trees, but the very air moving through them. The paint isn’t thick, more like a stain in places, letting the canvas breathe. And check out those tree trunks – they’re not standing straight, are they? They wiggle and bend, like they’ve got stories to tell. There’s a realness here, an honesty about how things actually look, not just how we think they should. Bernea was a Romanian painter who, later in life, became director of the National Museum of Art in Bucharest. In his paintings, he makes me think of Corot, an earlier landscape painter, who found poetry in the everyday. With Bernea, like Corot, it’s about seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, embracing the weird, wonky beauty of the world.