Contrastes Sur Fond Rouge 1952

Fernand Léger made this painting, ‘Contrastes Sur Fond Rouge’, with oil on canvas. Look at the colours! It’s all reds, greys, whites, yellows, and blues wrestling for attention. Léger lays down these strong colours and then he just surrounds them with thick black lines. These colours really pop. And it’s like the painting is a kind of game, with all these shapes and lines scattered about, colliding, and kind of, you know, not making sense together. And the surface has this smooth quality. There’s no texture, no brushstrokes. It is as if he wanted to hide his process, and just give us this flat, kind of mechanical looking image. It is like he’s saying, hey, this is painting, not a window, and this is all about the artifice. That big grey, sort of kidney shape, well, what is it doing there? Is it some kind of industrial form, or just a big blob, or something in between? Léger is like a precursor to Elizabeth Murray or Thomas Nozkowski, other artists who bend shapes and make them dance in unexpected ways. Ultimately, this kind of artmaking is about being open to the possibilities.