Festival Andino 1954

Nemesio Antunez made this print called Festival Andino, and what grabs me right away is how he's used these scratchy marks to build up a sense of a crowd. It's almost like he's not drawing people, but energy, or maybe some kind of collective spirit. I love the way the yellow shines through in the center, like a hidden light source. And those marks, they’re all so individual, but together they make a whole. You can almost feel the texture, the way the ink sits on the paper. I keep thinking about how each little scratch is a decision, a moment of doing. It reminds me a little of some of Francisco Goya's etchings, especially the way he captures the chaos and the intensity of human gatherings. I mean, art is just one big conversation anyway, right? Each artist riffing off the others, finding new ways to see the world. And that’s what Antunez does here, offering his own vision of a festival, not as a fixed image, but as something alive and always changing.