Los Gendarmes (The Police) 1942

José Guadalupe Posada made this relief etching, called ‘Los Gendarmes,’ sometime before 1913. It's a collision of theatre and the street, rendered in stark monochrome. You can really sense Posada carving into the block, each gouge a deliberate mark. The texture is everything here: the scratchy lines forming dense shadows, the way the figures emerge from the dark. Look at the looping flourishes around the text, and then the solid block of the policeman's coat. There’s a tension between the ornate and the brutally direct. The faces are so expressive, catching a quality of light and shadow. It reminds me of Daumier, who also used printmaking to skewer the powerful. Posada's prints were cheap, circulated widely, and were tools for social critique. They embrace the handmade, the imperfect, and the immediate. Art as a conversation, a shout in the dark.