Untitled 2011

Daan Lemaire made this untitled 70 x 50 cm painting with what looks like acrylic paint and maybe some other stuff, sometime in the 21st century. There's a real physicality to it. You can almost feel the brushstrokes, the way the paint was loaded onto the brush and then dragged across the surface. It’s kind of thin, but not washy, and you can see how he built up the layers, this dance of red and black that creates such an interesting tension. Look how the white peeks through, giving it this airy, almost unfinished quality. I'm drawn to the cluster of marks at the upper right, those little dots of red that seem to pop against the darker background. It’s like a tiny explosion, a moment of pure energy. It reminds me a bit of the abstract expressionists, like maybe Joan Mitchell, who were so good at capturing emotion through gesture. This is also a painting that embraces not knowing, and all the possibilities that can come out of that, in the studio and in life.