The Red Balloon

The red balloon must be extremely symbolic, and it’s clearly very abstract. You can interpret it in many different ways. The red balloon is in the center of the picture, making it the most important. It is also accompanied by a very light background, which makes it different to the rest of the figures, and it’s the only figure in the picture that does not use straight lines, along with a tree to the left border of the picture, or at least what seems to be a tree. If it weren’t for the balloon and the “tree”, the painting would almost have no sense, which is interesting, because the only two different figures are the only two that actually have some significance, or at least an obvious significance. Thanks to the balloon and the tree, what I see in the painting is a city, built over a hill and with a red balloon hovering over it. But the red balloon and the tree are not everything, also at first impression they appear to be. At the right, a series of squares of different sizes and colors are stacked over each other but in a very interesting way, because only their corners touch each other, making them seem as if they were excluding each other. So what we see is a series of unrelated objects making a single picture, and a picture that actually makes sense, even though all the elements in it have absolutely no relation with the rest, which may signify that everything we do, or everything that is, has an affect over the rest of the world, and the rest of the universe.