Cézanne’s Card Players – Art Puzzle

His painting aimed to reach the ultimate essence of the subject represented, through a constant study that was not only emotional, but also mathematical and rational. The color in his works is sometimes dense and material, creating actual construction lines, at other times so rarefied as to resemble watercolor. The synthesis of line and color in his works gave rise to geometric architectures and solid volumes. His work, so distant from the pictorial experiments of his time, inspired artists such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso .

Cézanne had something obsessive about creating his paintings: version after version of the same subject, sometimes changing a spatial detail, sometimes modifying a color tone, until he reached a deeper analysis of the scene depicted. The subject of the card players is no exception, repeated in five different variations where the perspective radically changes, increasingly focusing on the players’ action and the moment when one of the two will play the winning card, ending the game.

In this painting, the atmosphere is heavy; the two men don’t speak, intent as they are on their game. Their massive bodies face each other in a silence that seems to spread throughout the room.

The figures are perhaps familiar to Cézanne , who often visited his father’s country house, where he could peacefully observe scenes like this. The choice of colors and the way the light is distributed give the painting a sense of melancholy and sadness.