Lenora 1978

Rudolf Láng made this etching, Lenora, and you can just imagine him hunched over his plate, pushing into it with fine tools, building up this fantasy world bit by bit. It’s all in monochrome, with marks that evoke darkness and light, building up textures and forms. I feel for Láng as he’s making this world. He’s got this elegant woman, all frills and feathers, with an owl perched on her arm! And a slightly sinister dog at her feet. The background’s a frenzy of lines, maybe a forest, maybe just pure imagination. I wonder if he was thinking about Goya, about those strange, unsettling images that linger in your mind. Each scratch and scrape feels deliberate, a conversation between the artist and the metal. You can sense the push and pull, the trial and error, the slow reveal of an image that exists somewhere between dream and reality. It makes you wonder what stories Láng was trying to tell, and how we keep telling them to each other, over and over.