Still Life With Flowers, Fruit and Seashell 1970

Ion Pacea painted this still life with flowers, fruit and seashell, and you can tell that he knew artmaking is a process. It's not about perfectly depicting the objects, but about the experience of rendering them with paint. The way Pacea laid down the paint is really something. It's thick, like frosting, and opaque. You can almost feel the weight of the brushstrokes, and the texture of the canvas coming through. The yellow cloth kind of vibrates, and it is not a perfect yellow, it's got these other colors, greens and browns, mixed in. The white cloth, with its hint of blue, is kind of slapdash, but it works perfectly. There is something very Cezanne-like here, and maybe also a bit of Matisse. This feels like art being in conversation with other art, across time. I love it.