Image de Soleil Froid 1949

Enrique Antunez Zanartú made this dreamlike intaglio print, *Image de Soleil Froid*, at some point in his career. It’s all about texture, created with the dense network of etched lines across the plate. I love how the cold sun, that oval shape in the top corner, is not a perfect circle but a kind of organic blob, scored through with these almost violent scratch marks. They could have been done with some kind of dry point tool or even just a sharp knife. It’s a dark sun, a void, like staring into the blackest night. Then there’s the smooth, almost glowing shape rising up on the left with these floating, ghostly blobs attached to it. Is it a mountain, a body, or some kind of otherworldly being? Zanartú is playing with Surrealism in this piece; I'm reminded of the biomorphic abstraction of someone like Joan Miró. Art is an ongoing dialogue, after all. This print invites us into a strange and unsettling world, and that’s a conversation worth having.