Nature morte 1955

Bernard Buffet made this still life, called Nature Morte, in 1955. The painting has a frenetic energy to it, built up through all the straight, scratched lines. It makes me think about the kind of headspace Buffet might have been in at the time; the process of scratching away at a surface can be a kind of release. I can imagine the artist trying to pin down the objects in front of him with these black lines – the frying pan with eggs, the bottle, the glass – or maybe it was about finding the volume and density of the objects by wrapping these lines around them? Either way, the marks look sure, definite. The earthy brown hues mixed with some flashes of green and yellow create an interesting tension against the black lines. There’s this sense of something emerging from the chaos, which is kind of what painting is all about, isn’t it? The ongoing challenge of trying to find the form in the mess.