Untitled Part V 1988

Editor: Standing before us is Cy Twombly's "Untitled Part V" from 1988. He employs acrylic paint with an impasto technique, rendering an evocative statement. Curator: It hits me with a feeling of overwhelming tranquility, almost a sense of being submerged, perhaps in a forest stream or a grotto of sorts. What draws your eye initially? Editor: The biomorphic form of the support structure is critical. It echoes a window or portal, focusing our attention, framing the tension between verdant abstraction and implied landscape. Notice the aggressive drips from the top; these challenge our perception of control. Curator: I agree. Those drips! They are a primal mark-making—visceral. There's something very suggestive in the almost total dominance of greens, a color that holds cultural connotations of nature, growth, but also sometimes of envy. What do you make of that? Editor: Interesting you pick up on the cultural aspect. The lack of a clear focal point directs our gaze across the entirety of the canvas, creating a democracy of texture and application. This egalitarian visual field removes traditional hierarchies inherent in landscape painting. Instead of representation, Twombly presents a plane of pure affect. Curator: Indeed, it's hard to escape a comparison to certain landscape tropes—even the traditional idea of a body in nature and concepts such as “the sublime,” in a way that is simultaneously challenged by that act of abstraction. The viewer must engage directly with sensation over clear meaning. It has a mythic presence despite being so visually ambiguous. Editor: Perhaps in that mythic quality, the green as an overarching chromatic component reinforces a visual link to notions of nature worship, fertility or the natural elements in the human story—it reminds us how central landscape themes are to us psychologically, culturally. Curator: So in viewing it, our individual understanding and subconscious memory begins its work to reconcile both what is materially present as paint, but also how it evokes and reminds, visually and viscerally, in each of us. Editor: Precisely. Twombly offers not answers, but instead instigates the unfolding of meanings. A rich viewing experience indeed.