Exlibris Haniuk W. A. 1976

This is an etching by Oleksandr Aksinin, we don't know when it was made, but Aksinin lived and worked in Lviv until he died in the mid-eighties. Looking at it, I imagine Aksinin hunched over his plate, using needles to create these fine marks, building up tone and texture. Is that a crowd? Or maybe a barricade? And someone hiding behind a door... It's hard to tell. It’s like a dream, where symbols and associations emerge and then quickly dissolve. I wonder if he knew Piranesi's "Carceri d'Invenzione", with its labyrinthine spaces, stairways, and vaults? Both artists seem fascinated by the inner world, creating spaces where the rational and irrational coexist. Maybe Aksinin, like many artists, was inviting us to lose ourselves in these spaces. To reflect on the uncertainty of meaning and the beauty of not-knowing.