Groot landschap met palmbomen 1903 - 1945

Bernard Essers made this large landscape with palm trees, likely a woodcut, and I love the bold moves he makes. Look at how he’s carved out the image, the white spaces really sing against the dark ink. It’s like he's building the image out of a collection of marks. There's a real sense of texture. You can almost feel the roughness of the carved wood, the graininess of the paper. My eye keeps coming back to the giant agave plant in the foreground. It's so lush and spiky, carved with an energy that feels both precise and wild. Essers is doing something similar to what Gauguin did, simplifying form and flattening space, but he’s also pushing it further. He is thinking about printmaking and how images are created by carving away at material. It’s this embrace of process that makes this piece so special, and so relevant today.