NARRATOR:

Gunther Förg explored the idea of abstraction in its purest forms. Simple bands of color. Clean, linear shapes. Förg painted these works on sheets of lead. Artist Marc D’Estout spent some time with them.  

MARC D’ESTOUT:

I’m Marc D’Estout. I’m a sculptor, I work in metal, and often I paint on the surfaces of my pieces. 

When you look at this group of paintings, it implies movement. It’s almost like looking at a story board, where each rectangle and each color kind of moves across the surface, and they relate to each other in a very lyrical way. They’re not necessarily obvious colors, but they’re very seductive colors. There’s a richness to them. And that I think draws me in quite a bit. 

Lead’s a metal that’s very resilient, it doesn’t corrode, but the color of lead does change over time as it’s exposed to air. It darkens. It has this wonderful bluish-gray color that just feels heavy, which is ironic because it’s one of the easiest metals to bend and manipulate. And the way he’s applied the paint is not solid and consistent, but there’s variances in the paint itself that kind of complement the variances in the surface of the lead, or vice versa.