Composition #100 1982

Yuri Zlotnikov made this painting, Composition #100, with what looks like gouache or maybe thinned acrylic, and it feels like a landscape but also like a code. The marks are dabbed and scrubbed, and they accumulate into masses of colour, like a pointillist Seurat gone wild. I keep thinking about what it means to make a hundred of anything. Is it an index of time, or is it about the process of finding something out? The surface is alive with these little marks, some are opaque, some more translucent. I love the area in the middle, where little dots of blue and yellow create a shimmering effect. The dark figures on the right look like they were added later, perhaps as an afterthought. Looking at this, I'm reminded of the landscapes of Milton Avery, another artist who wasn't afraid to flatten space and use colour in unexpected ways. With a piece like this, meaning isn't fixed. It's more like an open question.