Neon 

Curator: Looking at this piece, what springs to mind for you? It's titled "Neon" by Jean Bertholle, executed in acrylic on canvas. Editor: Angular. Fragmented. The limited palette is oddly calming, despite the complexity. It's like a blueprint exploded into colour. Curator: Indeed. Bertholle, although a proponent of abstract expressionism, clearly experiments with a geometric vocabulary. The social and cultural currents of mid-century modernism would've favored an aesthetic of calculated disruption. Consider the museum context: a painting like this challenges academic traditions by celebrating abstraction, which breaks from prior institutional emphasis on figurative and didactic painting. Editor: Right. And considering acrylic paint—a relatively new medium at the time, allowing for vibrant color and faster drying—we see an emphasis on immediacy, on rapid application. You can almost see the hand of the artist moving across the canvas, laying down line after line, color blocking upon color blocking. It speaks to a specific process—a conscious layering. Curator: It prompts a reconsideration of the production process within painting and sculpture. The emphasis shifts from representing established social hierarchies to actively formulating modern ideologies by manipulating public taste through visual languages. Editor: But even within abstraction, the materiality matters. Acrylic doesn’t have the same weighty history as oil paint; it was arguably more accessible. We're potentially looking at a democratisation of art practice, as novel industrial processes grant greater opportunities for making and, perhaps, reshape art appreciation through different socio-economic classes. Curator: Yes, precisely. And the way galleries curated pieces such as this played a crucial role, determining whether these paintings challenged the status quo or ended up reinforcing pre-existing elitist cultural conventions. The public's understanding was definitely affected by museum displays. Editor: A dynamic interaction of material, process, and context... intriguing, and far from static. The canvas remains. Curator: Exactly, and a conversation around Bertholle's painting prompts questions around art’s wider engagement within societal power structures.