Sunken Treasures 1952

Gabor Peterdi made this intaglio print, 'Sunken Treasures', in 1952, and when I look at it, I imagine a hidden world, maybe even one under the sea. The surface has this amazing scratched texture, the lines are almost like scars, and they seem to want to uncover something. There's a tension between the grey, almost metallic background and the flashes of color – red, yellow, purple – that feel like glimpses of something alive and glowing. The white shapes remind me of bones or maybe the skeletons of buildings, things that time and water have transformed. There's a cluster of spiky lines on the left that could be an oil rig, or just a weird sea creature. The contrast reminds me of what Guston was doing in the late sixties, when he came back to figuration through abstraction, it's like an archeological dig, one that reveals the strange beauty of decay and the secrets that lie beneath the surface.