Still Life 1911

Kmetty János made this still life with oil on canvas, and while we don’t have a date for it, you get the sense of the artist working through something, and the colours aren't too laboured. Look at the surface, where János allows the pigment to sit on the canvas, building up a gentle texture, it’s neither thick nor thin but somewhere in between. I am looking at the shadows of the fruit, a mix of oranges and greens, almost like a bruise, which lends a quality of life to the image, a sense of the inevitable decay of organic matter and the passing of time. The colour feels like it is in service of something, the arrangement of the fruit and pitcher on the tabletop. There is a quietness to it that makes me think of Morandi. Both artists use a restricted palette and a repeated motif to explore the nature of seeing. For them, painting is a process of continual inquiry rather than a quest for fixed answers.