Paris – Quai Voltaire

Mily Possoz's painting is defined in the 1920s and 1930s, freed from a certain naturalist inclination that had been present in her painting at the beginning of the century, revealing in the construction of themes, sometimes of a nineteenth-century origin, a freedom of execution and fascination for painting in itself, consistent with a modernity that finds its models in Marquet and Dufy, or in the graphic stylizations of the time. In this work, the most common fey values of his painting give way to a work of a more substantial nature. There is a curious circular morphology that obsessively shapes the elements and is transmitted to the composition creating dynamic rhythms. The volumes, as the trees, are individualized and serially arranged, as well as with the archways of the bridge, whose intense reflection in the water completes the circles in order to emphasize the resulting morphology. Its repetition responds rhythmically to the grove. The elements that populate the foreground are treated with a deliberate ingenuity, especially the cars with the wheels prominently detached without the implicit distortion of the perspective. Almost frontal light creates material reverberations in the waters and in the grove on the other side, near the Louvre, or in the clouds. In the substantial treatment of the reflected light in the river, arranged by short and rectangular brushstrokes, especially among the grove, a certain influence of Eduardo Viana, a painter she admired, is detectable. These aspects define an extreme place in Mily Possoz's painting in which the agency of a form is conjugated and revealed in an infinity of motives, in order to organize a rhythmic space in which the pictorial substantiality surpasses its more traditional stylizations to the taste of the time.