Untitled #208

José Antonio Suárez Londoño

2003

A small etching and aquatint that assembles a frieze of images—mountains and a dotted sky, prowling doglike animals, a band of inscription, and a lower scene of human figures and a boat—to suggest a compact, fable-like narrative about memory and action.

What strikes you is the delicate, gray-lined frieze stacked in registers: patterned hills and stippled clouds above a tense pack of animals, a ribbon of handlike script, and a haunting lower register where sketched figures, writhing lines and a tipped boat orbit a dense, spherical form.

Londoño reinvigorates the intaglio tradition by using etching and aquatint to compress mythic storytelling and personal memory into a modern, small-scale print that links Latin American narrative practices with contemporary surreal and poetic imagery.

Palette

Art Terms

Aquatint Etching Intaglio Print Figurative Landscape Surrealism

Exhibitions

Committed to Print

1988

Spanish and U.S. Government Posters

1937

Latin-American Art, 1931–1966, from the Museum Collection

1967

Luis Quintanilla: An Exhibition of Drawings of the War in Spain

1938