Dynamism of an Automobile

A car dissolving into the speed it makes, painted by the Futurist who would soon quit the brush, build machines that howled and roared, and invent noise music.

1. 1
   The arrow / chevron force-lines

   Repeated across the canvas, the nested V-shaped wedges all pointing the way the car is going

   These nested arrowheads are the force-lines (linee-forza), the Futurist device for carrying an object’s energy out into the space around it. Stacked like a row of chevrons, they do not describe the car; they describe its push. They are the single most important thing on the canvas, because they are how a still painting is made to move.
2. 2
   The dissolved car body

   The denser knot of faceted, overlapping planes from which the wedges spring

   The actual vehicle is barely a vehicle. Its body shatters into overlapping shards and planes, so you read “car” more from the title and the thrust than from any fender, wheel, or windscreen. The subject is the speed, not the machine, and the machine has been let go almost entirely.
3. 3
   The thrust, driving one way

   The overall lean and sweep of the wedges and planes across the wide canvas

   The whole composition leans and drives in one direction, so your eye is pulled along the very path the car takes. On a canvas wider than it is tall, the landscape format itself becomes a runway, and the picture spends its width the way the car spends a straightaway.
4. 4
   The color planes

   The bands and shards of color stepping back from the leading edges

   Color is laid in flat-ish planes rather than modelled into rounded, solid form, each plane reading like a stage in the car’s passage, one position after another. It is closer to a diagram of motion, a stop-frame stack, than to a portrait of a thing sitting still.
5. 5
   The wedge composition

   The way the wedges fan out from the dense core toward the open field ahead

   The picture is built out of one shape, the wedge, multiplied and rotated and fanned forward, so the structure of the painting is the structure of acceleration itself. Find the repeated wedge and you have found the picture’s skeleton; everything else hangs on it.
6. 6
   Speed as form

   Anywhere you try, and fail, to find a recognizable automobile

   Step back and there is no clear car to point at, only the sensation of one tearing past. That refusal to render the object, in favor of rendering the experience of the object moving, is the whole Futurist wager, and it pushes this canvas right up to the edge of pure abstraction.