Panama 1985

Eduardo Arroyo made this painting, Panama, but I don’t know when or with what! It’s like a jumble of figures scattered on a pale brown surface. The figures are mostly flat shapes, like cutouts, and rendered in block colours – black, white, and red. They’re not painted with any tonal variation, so the effect is graphic. Look at the figure that stands alone in the bottom right corner. It looks unfinished because it is just a line. It's like Arroyo is showing us his process. The texture, colour, surface and materiality of the piece are all flattened out, creating a dreamlike and ambiguous composition. Arroyo's shapes are reminiscent of Philip Guston's later, cartoon-like forms. Like Guston, Arroyo embraces the messy, the contradictory, and the unresolved. And that's how art should be, right? A space for ambiguity and endless possibilities.