Sin título (Untitled)

The wellspring of Szyszlo’s abstraction, the vast Andean landscape looms large and austere in his work, permeated with the memory of its ancestral past. Brooding and desolate, his images evoke the topography of the land and its stirring indigenous history through the drama of light and shadow, calibrated in contrasting textures and layers of tone. A steely chiaroscuro amplifies the raw power of the present etching, concentrated in the dark, totemic figure illuminated against the misty "garúa", the dense fog that seasonally descends upon the Peruvian coast. Monumental in stature, the figure is incised with dense, scratchy patterns of lines and shapes, some glowing in red, that recall the warp and weft weaving and complex, geometric design of prized Chancay textiles, which Szyszlo studied and collected. The etching’s graphic structure and tonal complexity is achieved through the intaglio printmaking technique, in which the vigor and integrity of line—first drawn onto a prepared metal plate—is preserved.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.