Exlibris of V.Voldemarov 1978

This is Oleksandr Aksinin’s ‘Exlibris of V.Voldemarov,’ made in 1978. The image has been carefully etched with thin lines of acid eating into the plate, building up these strange layered scenes. It's a bookplate so it's necessarily small, the eye has to travel around this miniature landscape of graphic marks. I can imagine him with his magnifying glass, digging into the copper, making those tiny lines and marks that give a strange sense of three-dimensionality to the image. It has the kind of visual complexity you see in the work of other Eastern European artists like the Quay Brothers or Jan Švankmajer, with that same slightly dark, slightly melancholic, humour. It is a private world. The image has a surreal, dreamlike quality with its bizarre figures and impossible architecture. I guess that's what books can do, transport you to other, stranger, worlds. I wonder how Aksinin's image spoke to the collector who owned the book?