Zapatista Landscape. The Guerrilla 1915

Diego Rivera painted 'Zapatista Landscape' using oil on canvas, and the way he breaks down the figure and the background into these geometric shapes, well, it’s like he's building the image from the ground up. The colour palette is pretty restrained, but there are flashes of red, green and yellow which keep it alive, like a flicker of hope. I love how Rivera uses the texture of the paint to create a sense of depth and form. The rifle, for instance, has this incredible weight to it, like you could pick it right off the canvas. Notice the serape; the weave looks as though it has been collaged onto the canvas, but its just the magic of paint. It’s almost like he's inviting us to question what we see, and to reconsider the relationship between representation and abstraction. You know, looking at this painting, I am reminded of Picasso and Braque, artists whose work shared a similar fascination with the deconstruction of form. Rivera takes this conversation and gives it his own voice, his own history. Art is like that, an ongoing dialogue, questioning and reshaping ideas over time.