Nude 2008

This is Romul Nutiu’s painting, ‘Nude’, and it’s all about the paint. Look how Nutiu lets the colours mix and mingle, almost like they’re having a conversation right on the canvas. The texture is key here; you can practically feel the thickness of the paint. It’s as if Nutiu is sculpting with colour. See how the red and yellow kind of wrestle with the cooler blues and browns? And the figure is barely there, just a suggestion, a ghostly outline against the riot of colour. That one dark line that creates the profile, is not really describing the form but is the memory of a form. It makes me think of Joan Mitchell, in the way she made these abstract landscapes of feeling. In both cases, you get the sense that the painting is a record of an event, a moment of seeing and feeling transformed into something tangible and alive. It's not about perfection, it's about the messy, glorious process of becoming.