Faust 1984

Oleksandr Aksinin made this etching, called *Faust*, at some point in his short life. The figures are these ghostly, pale forms emerging from a dark, textured ground, and it's all about how he's scratched and bitten into that plate, right? The lower half of the figures dissolve into these pebble-like shapes, like the figures are returning to the earth, or maybe they're weighed down, burdened. Look at the line across the back of the figure, like a crack in their form. It reminds me how, when you're etching, you never really know what you're going to get until you pull that print. There’s a kind of alchemy to it, a surrender to the process. Aksinin’s work reminds me of other Eastern European artists, like Goya or Paula Rego, who wrestled with the darker sides of the human condition, but with a surrealist edge. It's this push and pull between control and accident, darkness and light, that makes the work so compelling.