Figura Sobre Fondo Azul 1971

This is a collage on masonite called "Figura Sobre Fondo Azul" by Fernando García Ponce. Look at how the bright colors are broken up by the stark white and deep blue. It’s like he's wrestling with the surface, pushing and pulling these different shapes into a kind of organized chaos. I am drawn to the lower left, to the textured red. It looks like a collection of little windows or boxes, piled up almost haphazardly. The paint is thick, you can almost feel the weight of it, like layers of memory building upon each other. Then, next to it, a grid of stamps, little glimpses into other worlds, other stories, all contained within this one frame. There is a tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the illusion of depth created by the collage elements. It makes me think of Kurt Schwitters, how he gathered scraps of the world and turned them into something new, something beautiful and strange. It reminds me that art is always a conversation, a remix of ideas, a way of seeing the world anew.