Composition. Still Life with a Coffee Pot 1959

Valerii Lamakh made this oil painting, "Composition. Still Life with a Coffee Pot," with a really interesting approach to colour and form; it's all about how the painting comes together, a puzzle being solved. Looking closely, you can see how Lamakh used thick paint to build texture, really emphasizing the physicality of the medium. The blues and browns work together to create a kind of shadowy, intimate space. See how the brushstrokes around the coffee pot are loose and expressive? It’s like Lamakh is inviting us to see the world in a broken-down, reassembled way, not as a smooth, perfect picture, but in fragments. I see echoes of Cézanne in the way Lamakh breaks down the still life into geometric forms, but with a bolder, more graphic sensibility. Ultimately, it's a reminder that art is an ongoing experiment, always questioning and reimagining how we perceive the world.