The Penholder 1918

Roger de La Fresnaye made this watercolour, "The Penholder," probably around 1918, and it's a playful dance between representation and abstraction. The colour palette is muted, almost like a faded memory, yet the forms have this incredible presence. There's a beautiful tension in the piece. Look at the dark grey square; its opaque flatness sits against the more transparent washes of the surrounding shapes. The artist isn't trying to hide the process but instead revels in the materiality of the paint itself. You can almost feel the artist tilting the paper to coax the watercolour into those shapes. This piece reminds me a little of Juan Gris, who also explored this territory of flattened space and fractured form, but Fresnaye has a gentler, more whimsical touch. Ultimately, "The Penholder" invites us to see the world not as a collection of fixed objects, but as a space of infinite possibilities.