Hommage à Martin Luther King 1968

Alfred Manessier painted this 'Hommage à Martin Luther King' with oil on canvas, and what strikes me first is how the colours almost claw at each other, a push-and-pull between blues and reds. You can see artmaking here as a kind of raw, emotional process. The materiality is really something, isn't it? The paint isn't smoothed over, it's kind of chunky and you can almost feel the energy he put into each stroke. Look closely, and you will see that the colours are both transparent and opaque. The reds seem to bleed into the blues, like a bruise. It's pretty clear what kind of brush Manessier was using, creating these feathery, directional marks that feel like they're radiating from a central point. This radiating effect reminds me of Kandinsky's earlier experiments with abstraction, although Manessier brings a certain gravity and weight to the canvas that feels very much his own. It’s the kind of piece that embraces ambiguity. It allows us to feel many things at once.