Landscape 1917

Janos Mattis-Teutsch painted this landscape with oil on cardboard; the repetitive horizontal lines create a wonderful sense of depth. The colour palette is so interesting, the artist is clearly interested in the process, and how all the colours sit and work together on the cardboard. The texture is really tactile, you can imagine the artist really working the surface, pushing the paint around in confident strokes. There is a clear focus on the materiality of the painting, and the layering of these bands of colour, orange, purple, pink, almost like geological strata. There's something about the unwavering horizontality of the lines, how they refuse to bend to the perspective. Look at that band of green running along the horizon line, echoed in the stripes that run horizontally across the ‘path’, there is something really satisfying about it. Mattis-Teutsch was an interesting and somewhat overlooked modernist, maybe he was looking at Gauguin, but with a uniquely Eastern European sensibility. Ultimately the piece remains enigmatic, defying any singular interpretation, and inviting us to engage with its vibrant ambiguity.