Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Berto Lardera
Italian; 20th-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
42%
Humain-Surhumain. 1969. Etching with aquatint and carborundum
Seems very much like the unimaginative calque of a sculptor's sculptural sensibility into two dimensions, right down to the flaky surface of the impression. That’s exactly what this print is, of course: Lardera was a sculptor of modernist metal widgets, and this is essentially just a flattened metal widget. Granted, there's a forwardness and a power to the large form depicted, which takes up a lot of space and does so with command — look at the way the arched rectangle in the top right denies that anything interrupt it till that line of quavering blank dots falls into view at its left. Most often, though, this piece is equivocation: all the shaky edges are like the artist hedging about making hard-and-fast compositional decisions. Ditto w/r/t the gradient colors. (2024)