Untitled (2012) is a playful watercolour by Nicolas Party, who employs a bold, distinctive style to re-energise traditional artistic subjects. The well-worn formal ‘characters’ he invigorates include portraits, still lifes and landscapes: the present work is from the latter category. With a bright crispness that echoes the paper cut-outs of Matisse, Party depicts grasses and bushes emerging in hues of turquoise, deep green and sunflower yellow from a warm, earthy red ground. Their flat, sinuous shapes interlock like pieces of a puzzle, with some growing organically beyond the picture’s painted edge. The scene’s otherworldly palette lends it a dreamlike air. One tall, yellow form seems to have a dark opening at its front, making it look less like a tree than a tepee; the gathered foliage bristles with character and mystery. Rather than depicting the real world, Party’s works explore the elements of genre, and how any given artwork exists in relation to the continuum of art history. ‘If I want to draw a tree,’ he says, ‘I look into my memory, go to the “tree box”, open it up, and look at what’s inside. I really like this exercise. Your memory makes a very interesting and surprising selection. In my case, my “memory tree box” is naturally full of drawings and paintings of trees. I remember a tree that someone was cutting down in a Bergman film. I don’t remember the title, plot, or anything else about that movie; just that moment with the tree’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ‘Interview Nicolas Party’, Spike, no. 44, Summer 2015).