De sportploert 1923

Erich Wichmann made this print called ‘De sportploert,’ which roughly translates to ‘The Sport Soot’ in Dutch, using lithography. The image comes into focus as we look closer, like a face emerging from smoke. The magic of lithography is that it allows for incredibly subtle gradations of tone. The artist coaxes an image out of a stone using grease and acid. The face here is built up from a kind of velvety darkness, with the light areas feeling almost like erasures or absences of tone. It's a process of addition and subtraction, much like how we form memories. The more I look, the more this face seems to shift. It’s solid and present, but also fleeting, like a phantom. It’s interesting to think about what it means to capture a likeness using such an ephemeral technique. Maybe Wichmann was thinking about other artists like Odilon Redon, who conjured up dreamlike images with charcoal. Art, like memory, is never really fixed, is it?