L'Atelier 1971

Dado's "L'Atelier," a painting, lays out a kind of workshop, or maybe a battlefield, hard to tell, where nothing is fixed and everything seems to be transforming. The way Dado slathers on the paint, thick and crusty in some spots, thin and transparent in others, it's like he's building up the image layer by layer, almost like memory itself. Looking at the surface, you can see these ghostly figures emerging from the muck, heads and bodies caught in a kind of perpetual state of becoming. There's one figure in particular, bent over, carrying something on its back, that catches my eye. The texture is so built up there; it's like Dado was wrestling with the paint, trying to give form to something grotesque yet human. It reminds me a little of Francis Bacon, the way he twisted and contorted the human figure. But Dado’s got his own thing going on, his own way of making us confront the messiness of existence. It’s not pretty, but it's real.