La Femme au Cheval
Woman with a Horse was conceived in such a way that the viewer is obliged to contemplate the manifold surface of the painting for an extended period of time, piecing together the recognizable forms, not just in space, but in time; due to the temporal evolution resulting from the act of moving around the subject (during the painting process). Only then do the more obscure structures become legible with the topological context of the multi-dimension space of the whole. The radical new concept based on a non-conventional precepts of space and time transformed the canvas from something quasi-static to something that possessed dynamic evolutionary characteristics. No longer governed by Euclidean geometry (or classical Renaissance perspective), Metzinger's Woman with a Horse is composed of a series of ellipses, curvilinear and rectilinear structures and planes juxtaposed and distributed throughout the canvas in myriad complex combinations of abstract volumetric forms that suggest rather than define the underlying subject.
