Tramonto 1946

Luigi Russolo painted "Tramonto" using what looks like pastel to capture a sunset. There’s something really lovely about how he's layered colors in the sky, dragging the pastels to create those wispy clouds. It reminds me of being a kid and just scribbling with crayons, letting the colors blend right on the page. He's got this great sense of atmosphere, those mountain silhouettes fading into the distance. It’s all about the materiality, the chalky texture of the pastel on the page, which gives it this soft, dreamy quality. Check out the little patch of trees on the left; the way he's suggested the foliage with just a few strokes. It feels related to the later work of someone like Agnes Martin, who used a similar approach to making landscapes. Both artists leave a lot to the imagination. There's no one way to understand a landscape, especially a sunset, and Russolo gets that.