Peter Lanyon

at TATE

Lost Mine, 1959

You are deep underground. Everything is a hue of black. Suddenly, the water is flooding the place(blue). You see water pouring in from everywhere. Now, seemingly strong and solid structure holding up the place start to crumble. You understand that it is not only the structure collapsing it is your life(red). Some flares of (white) hope keep you running for the exit. But the only things you see in the escape opening are the new waves of blue ruthless water.

Weekend Edition 35

Pablo Picasso

La pisseuse, 1965

Every woman is a carefully constructed outer image (white stains - the dress). The image is built in the way that you should not see that it was constructed (the pyramid wrapped in the white cloth). Her exposed breasts represent her sexuality. The legs show her groundedness, her pragmatism and common sense. Her vagina is her connection to the nature. The stream coming out of her is the time that is part of her relation with the nature.

Lúcia Laguna

at Galeria Fortes Vilaça (Art 43 Basel 2012)

Jardim N. 2, 2011

It's hot summer day. The city is whited out by sun and dust. Narrow pathetic strips of grass on the sidewalks don't cut it(the green line from the lower left to the lower center). Everything looks like a big hot concrete box that is cracking under the heat.You feel like a fish in deep frying pan(the gray structure in the center). Then, you see a garden. It is full of trees, greenery and shadows. It is small. It is scarred with asphalt pathways. But it is a small patch of wild nature trapped in the urban center. It wakes something animalistic, wild in you. You feel an urge to run and to hide in the deepest shadows you can find.

Weekend Edition 27

Richard Diebenkorn

Untitled, 1970

Winter. Naked black trees. Everything is gray. Even the snow is not white anymore. You have a cold, depressing feeling. Everything is smaller than it is used to be. The roads are narrower. You have a need to cuddle into small with your blanket. You are passive, trying to save the energy to heat yourself.

Sophie Von Hellerman

at Greene Naftali ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

September 01 (explosion)

Autumn is very beautiful. It is very colorful : orange, yellow, green, brown. It is bright, cheerful, sexy. And depressing. It is sad, because you know all this beauty is a preamble to emptiness, cold, gray skies, rains and winter. This is the cycle of nature  : everything dies to give room to new things. The autumn is a good reminder that the time is going by as a river with a strong stream. And we will have our September sooner or later.

Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe

at Alexander Gray Associates ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Dawn in any city , 2011

The man can put everything into boxes. He can organize, catalog and categorize everything. That's how we deal with the Unknown. But you cannot put Nature into a box. It will fight you. The Nature will be free or it will die. So for the Nature it is a survival fight. And sometimes when the Nature cannot escape, it will create a small world inside its box. Inside her small world the Nature is free.

Gerhard Richter

at Van de Weghe Fine Art (TEFFAF Maastricht 2012)

Abstraktes Bild (889-12), 1932

There is a conflict. The man conquers nature( a beige pipe in the lower center background) by erecting in its place a huge cement block(the porous gray-blue figure in the upper right part of the picture). The orange flames in the upper left corner show the ongoing struggle. Despite by feeling victorious the man starts an internal conflict. He tries to change the barrier he himself created(the blue scratches, yellow and red lines on the cement) . But it is a much harder task to accomplish.

Imi Knoebel

Imi Knoebel at Von Bartha (TEFAF Maastricht 2012)

Lina-Liza-Strasse 4, 2000

The human brain always looks for patterns and logical explanation of the world. If you glance at the picture, you will try subconsciously to arrange the rectangles into a straight grid. But they are not straight. Some go this way, some stick out. Yes, Nature has its own laws, but it has so many exceptions that the exceptions become the new law. There is no justice in the nature, only a chance. You can draw a yellow card, you can get lucky and draw a white card (or no card at all). But there are cases when you get the black card. It is not fair, it is random.

Nina Pohl

Nina Pohl at Sprüth Magers Berlin London (The Armory Show 2012)

Untitled, 2008

People always try to hide the nature that inside them. They hide their bodies in clothes, they change their appearance, they modify their behavior. They have been doing everything in the name of high ideal. Just to show that a man is not an animal.But you cannot fight your own nature. You can't change what you are. Your attempts at best will look like a poorly designed tree house in which you are trying to live permanently. But usually it is just a hurricane wreck. 

Jacco Olivier

Jacco Olivier at Marianne Boesky Gallery(The Armory Show 2012)

Landscape, 2010

When you see a beautiful landscape, you feel the energy of Nature.You can almost touch unbreakable hope made of steel (the blue line all over). You can smell the freedom. You feel being a part of Nature.You are dissolving into a breeze. Then it returns to what it is - a small sunny Sunday picnic with your family in the park on outskirts of the town where you live.

Pierluigi De'Lutti

Pierluigi De'Lutti at Taglialatella Galleries

Autunno Canadese, 2010

Autumn in Canada. There is a lot of yellow, red and burgundy. There are days when the sun is out. You can see the bright light and blue sky, but it's very cold and windy(white undertones). It is getting dark pretty fast.The more the Nature is rough, tough and unforgiving, the more we are attracted to her.

Terry Winters

Terry Winters at Matthew Marks Gallery (Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Tessellation Figures (6)

Human brain works on patterns.It builds statistical models of every input the brain gets(the floor tiles of different colors). Then the brain uses the models to predict what happen next, so it would be ready to react accordingly. Sometimes the patterns and theories fail, and people need to invent a new theory. That's why you see several layers of tiles one over the other. And still the world that surrounds us is so vast that we can't explain everything.

Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann at Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe (Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Splendour

The biggest source of splendour is Nature. You call it splendor when you see vast amounts of land(yellow spot) or vegetation(green spot). When there is large open space, there is a lot of open blue sky(blue spot in the middle). Another thing from nature you call splendor is sun - sunsets and sunrises(the red spot). And water, don't forget the water(dark blue). And this takes to the storms. The seconds before the storm could be magnificent, or splendid - splendor(the bordeaux  stain).  The storm is a bird-like figure in the upper middle, combination of bordeaux, red and dark blue.

Yang Yanping

Yang Yanping at Peter Findlay Gallery

Autumn Symphony

The beauty of decay. The autumn is very colorful. Yellow, red, blue sky(on sunny days). But don't fool yourself, it's a demise. It turns the colors into black and ugly. The brown overtones shows that you understand that it's a cycle of nature. It's necessary to shred the old, so the young can grow. But still it makes you sad. The bright background is not what you think. It is not nice. It's winter.