Illustrations for The Trial by F. Kafka 1975

This is one of Oleksandr Aksinin's illustrations for Kafka’s "The Trial," and it's like a maze for your eyes, made with ink. I'm drawn to the way Aksinin uses black and white. It's so graphic, so immediate. The texture here is amazing. Look at the cross-hatching, how dense and precise it is in those foreground shapes, like tiny, obsessive marks building up form. They contrast so much with the smooth, deep black of the central space, which is as flat and unknowable as the bureaucracy Kafka was writing about. Then, there’s that little figure tucked in the corner, crawling up the wall, leaving a trail of dots. To me it looks like someone trying to escape the frame, the system, the story itself. This reminds me of Piranesi, all these dark and complicated interiors. It's about how spaces can trap us, how stories can trap us. Art is like that too. It can open doors but also close them.