March 1975

Oleksandr Aksinin made this print, March, using etching, and it’s amazing. The whole piece is so linear and etched, you get the sense of the labor, the intensity, and the mark-making process. Look at the way the figure is built with lines; it’s not about shading, but about creating tone with density, which is a very different way of seeing. There’s a flatness to the figure, almost like a playing card, surrounded by all these little gadgets and floating geometric devices. I keep coming back to the face with its mask-like quality, divided right down the middle, yet it’s bisected by eyeglasses, which are also circles! Aksinin plays with the contrast of these very rigid geometries with a very organic, almost psychedelic sensibility. It puts me in mind of Alfred Jarry, who combined nonsense and philosophy. Aksinin's vision feels both intensely personal and part of a broader conversation around art as an ongoing experiment.