Garden of Earthly Pleasures. Boschiana 1976

Oleksandr Aksinin made this print called Garden of Earthly Pleasures in 1977. It’s all these tiny etched lines, coming together in a world that feels both playful and a bit unsettling. I imagine Aksinin hunched over the plate, maybe even using a magnifying glass, to get all those details just right. The composition is so dense, so full of figures and objects, like a dream you can’t quite make sense of but can't shake from your memory either. It reminds me of Hieronymus Bosch – the way he crams his paintings full of strange creatures. It's all kind of dark and funny at the same time. Look at that wheel at the bottom, grinding away. Is it a wheel of progress, a wheel of suffering, or just a quirky detail that Aksinin threw in to mess with us? Maybe he’s saying that earthly pleasures are also tied to the mundane and repetitive. It feels like he’s in conversation with artists from the past, like Bosch, but doing his own thing, with his own sense of humor and strangeness.