Untitled 1963

Gunther Gerzso made this untitled painting with some sort of medium in shades of white, brown and black. I wonder how many layers it took to achieve such clarity. I can imagine Gerzso stepping back, squinting, maybe tilting his head to one side, deciding where to add a bit more weight, a shadow, a line. The white rectangle hovers there, a blank slate, or maybe a screen onto which something will be projected. The browns ground it, warm and earthy, like the umber underpainting you see in so many old masterpieces. That dark brown line, though, slicing across – it almost reads like a horizon, with distant hills. Was Gerzso thinking of landscapes, of horizons? It reminds me a little of Diebenkorn, the way he played with space and form, making something both abstract and deeply felt. It's the conversation painters have across time, borrowing, responding, always pushing the language further. There's a sense of searching here, of something solid being built.