Tricia Gillman on Braques late paintings

Re: Braques late paintings

'....with the sense that the vocabulary of picture making is being thrown up into the air and deconstructed into a grammar of parts which settle into place momentarily. That's what's so thrilling about them: them moment you look at something, it goes on a journey. It can settle for a moment but then moves on. They're about transformation, poetic metaphor, an articulation of the creative process. A line settles on the profile of a bust and then moves off it and becomes a free line, just an arabesque. And the way he used white in the paintings; there are bits of white that describe illusionistically and bits of white that float free like abstract moments in time. One minute the bird settles on an easel, the next minute its a myriad of fragments. Or there is a painting thats been abandoned, as if the parts have been exploded or been given up on. There's the sense of something in continual change. The journey through the picture is like a conversation between something which is described and something which is imagined. The dislocation of time and space present in Braque's works is to me fundemental in the construction of an elastic language.'

Contemporary visual arts magazine issue 14 1997 p31