Musique et danse 1949

Roger Vieillard made this etching, ‘Musique et danse,’ sometime in the 20th century, and what strikes me is how he's building a world with lines. It's like a personal alphabet, where each mark feels both deliberate and intuitive. The texture is fascinating, you can see the hand at work in the cross hatching. The etched lines create a visual rhythm, dense in some areas, sparse in others. There's a section near the bottom right where the figures seem to float. It's as if the dance is taking place in our own minds. Vieillard reminds me a little bit of Paul Klee, in the sense that he’s not trying to copy reality but to invent a kind of visual language all of his own. It's about finding his own way to translate an experience into a picture.