La pacca di maiale (The Half Pig) 1924

Luigi Bartolini made "The Half Pig" as an etching, and you can almost feel the scratch of the needle on the plate. Look at the density of lines clustered and cross-hatched, making the pig’s body seem to be in the process of both appearing and disappearing. I can imagine Bartolini hunched over his plate, using the etching needle to describe the texture of the dead animal. He must have felt the weight of the subject in his hands, the heaviness of death, but also, the geometry of the hanging carcass. The composition is cleverly staged, with the ladder and surrounding objects creating a kind of still life around a horrific scene. It's not Goya, but there’s a shared understanding of how to use mark-making to express something deeply felt. Artists are always in conversation with one another, carrying on a tradition of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity and uncertainty. Meaning is multiple, never fixed.