Colosseum 1963

Rudy Pozzatti made this print of the Colosseum sometime around 1963 using a black ink on paper. Look how Pozzatti uses a kind of frantic mark-making, almost like he’s scratching into the surface of the paper, this feels really immediate and process-driven to me. The stark black and white contrast gives it a bold, graphic quality, right? If you get up close, you can see how the ink bleeds and pools in certain areas, creating these unexpected textures and depths. There's this one spot, near the bottom left, where the ink seems to have really taken hold, forming this dense, almost chaotic cluster of marks. It's like a microcosm of the entire piece, all that energy concentrated in one spot. It puts me in mind of Piranesi, and his etchings of Rome, but it's also reminiscent of Franz Kline, but in print. Pozzatti reminds us that art is never created in a vacuum, but rather through this ongoing conversation across time.