Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Emile Josome Hodinos
French; 19th-century
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (The Gallery of Everything’s Booth)
75%
Commerce Industrie Medallions. c1876-1896. Ink on paper
Hodinos was institutionalized but not before he got to study drawing and engraving. A discovery of Dubuffet's, he spent his days maniacally designing medals and coins. This drawing is charming — perhaps more than charming — for several reasons. First, there’s the coexistence of and uncanny interactions between multiple fields and planes, the relative significance of each of which is never quite clear (or even necessarily consistent or fixed). For instance, those three different views of a woman's head appear at first glance to be straight-up medallions, but their edges are clipped and combined in various ways to accommodate the non-(or less-)illusionistic spaces that surround them. So, are the medallions trompe-l'oeil effects layered on top of a virtual space with which they have no diegetic relation? Or are they components of that virtual space in some tough-to-decipher way? Then what about the text — does it exist in the literalist space of words on a page, or in some sort of hybrid textual-pictorial zone? These questions are unanswerable but their asking is integral to one's aesthetic experience of this drawing. Second, there's the intermedial effect — the artwork looks like an engraving but is actually a drawing. Third, there's the intricacy of the detailing, which is abstractly delightful but also a key component of the productive spatial and semantic ambiguities I mentioned above. Just look at that spot in the top center of the page where the banding ends and the text seeps around it. (2025)