Design for the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 'Don Giovanni' 1913

Pyotr Konchalovsky probably used gouache to design this opera set for Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’. It’s like looking into a diorama through a proscenium arch. I love how he’s translated a three-dimensional space into something so flat. Everything is on the surface and presented as blocks of colour; there’s no trompe l’oeil. The painting is so direct and unpretentious in its material language; the colours are dense, tactile, and full of light. The backdrop has such a theatrical quality, with its fairy-tale castles rendered in the style of children’s book illustrations. The brickwork pattern is also such an intriguing design feature, and looks so radical against the backdrop’s perspectival recession. I can imagine Konchalovsky experimenting with different ways of applying paint, constantly adjusting to the needs of the composition. It feels like he’s in conversation with artists like the Fauves and the German Expressionists, who liberated colour from any descriptive function. But maybe he wasn’t thinking about them at all. That’s how art works.