Mechanic Imitation 2013

Rodrigo Franzao made this painting, Mechanic Imitation, layering broad, sweeping marks with sharp geometric shapes. I love how he's fearlessly combined these gestures with flat planes of primary colour, giving the piece a real sense of dynamism and tension. The textures and colours are really striking. The paint is applied in these bold, almost calligraphic sweeps of mixed colour, which feel super immediate. You can almost see the artist's hand moving across the canvas. These marks contrast beautifully with the bright, hard-edged, cut-out shapes. Notice the red shapes that resemble a deconstructed alphabet. The matte surface of the red and green areas sits right on top of the ground in contrast to the painterly depths of the sweeps of the brush. It reminds me a bit of early Kandinsky, where he’s trying to figure out how to bring abstraction and representation into a conversation. It's this ongoing exploration of how we see and experience the world around us, where the answers remain wonderfully open-ended.