Hills 1965

Horia Bernea made this painting, Hills, with oils, and, I imagine, a whole lotta green. Look at the way the paint's been applied! It's all about these intuitive, almost haphazard strokes, right? Like he's wrestling with the very idea of landscape. I'm drawn to the foreground where the brushwork gets really scrummy, almost sculptural. You can practically feel the thickness of the paint, see how the bristles have dragged and dabbed. What's amazing is how he uses these gobs of green to suggest form, texture, light—the whole shebang. There is a real energy in that mark making. Bernea reminds me a bit of Courbet, but with a twist. There is a similar commitment to capturing the raw essence of nature. But while Courbet revels in the grandeur, Bernea finds poetry in the ordinary. He reminds us that art isn’t about perfect representation; it’s about feeling, seeing, and engaging with the world in all its messy, beautiful ambiguity.