Exlibris of V.Syper 1978

Curator: Oh, my first thought: Edward Gorey does nautical psychedelia. Editor: Here we have "Exlibris of V.Syper," an engraving created by Oleksandr Aksinin in 1978. Curator: It's a trip, isn't it? That intense, stippled black surrounding a kind of ritualistic… craft? The whole thing feels like a coded message. I wonder who V. Syper was. Some alchemist sea captain, perhaps? Editor: An "ex libris" is essentially a bookplate, so this print would have been pasted into the owner's books as a mark of possession. Aksinin, a Ukrainian artist, was deeply involved in surrealism and the grotesque. The bookplate often symbolized the owner's intellectual world. Curator: That makes sense. There’s such an overwhelming sense of detail, so many bizarre little things… that strange figure emerging from the stern, the bucket dangling precariously, even the oddly formal banners! And what is that segmented… missile hanging above it all? Everything looks symbolically overloaded, as if one detail at a time would reveal an epic underlying the image as a whole. Editor: Exactly. The symbolism in Aksinin's work often touches on the occult and archetypal mythologies. Note the vessel—a container of sorts. Consider its placement within a dark, seemingly limitless space, an idea further highlighted by those strange boundary markers that lead your eye out of the frame. Are we seeing a soul's voyage across some unknowable ocean? Curator: A "soul's voyage"—I love that! I might borrow that for one of my books… or songs! The texture he achieves with engraving is remarkable, too. The light practically glows despite being surrounded by so much ink. Editor: Aksinin's work really forces you to contemplate the inner life of things, how we project our meanings, our fears, and our hopes onto the objects and symbols that surround us. It speaks to the universal human experience. Curator: It reminds us that we’re all adrift, I suppose, searching for something meaningful. I definitely want to know more about the symbols that filled Oleksandr’s universe! Editor: Indeed, an endless source of exploration for both us and perhaps for V. Syper too.