The Futurist – Rijksmuseum

Description

Chris Lanooy was primarily known as a ceramicist — the Dutch art world had filed him neatly under “craft” and largely left him there. Then he painted this, and the filing system broke. The Futurists believed that speed, force, and industrial energy were the new sublime — that the roar of a machine was more honest than a pastoral landscape — and Lanooy took that idea and made it visceral. This isn’t a painting you analyse. It hits you first and explains itself later, if at all. The fact that it carries an attribution question — “attributed to” — only adds to its power: sometimes the most alive things resist being pinned down. On large-format museum-grade canvas, the impasto thickness that makes this composition so raw and physical finally gets the scale to overwhelm you the way it was always meant to.