Untitled 1973

Antonio Palolo made this untitled painting using acrylic on canvas. The way the colours abut each other is what gets me here, that high-key green holding court over the deep-set blues and those rhythmic reds. There's such a sense of joy in the colour, almost a childlike simplicity in the rendering of these blocks and lines. If you look closely, you can see where the paint hasn't fully covered the canvas, there are tiny pinpricks of blue in the green which suggest an underlayer showing through. The red stripes are ever so slightly misaligned, like a printmaking error, a mistake. The painting has such clarity in its composition, the slight imperfections become little moments of humanity, the evidence of the hand. Palolo's from Portugal, and I'm reminded of Josef Albers, or even Ellsworth Kelly, though there's something folksier at play here, and I think that's what makes it so appealing.