Genur.art

Riso-printed surreal portrait on a flat cobalt field. A 26-year-old woman is shown in strict profile against a solid saturated blue background with no depth and no horizon, her figure printed in two inks — a warm bone white for the skin and a dense black for the hair and shadow — so she reads as a poster rather than a person. Her head is tipped back slightly and her mouth is open, and out of it rises a slow spiralling column of small white moths, thirty or more, climbing in a loose helix to the top of the frame and thinning as they go. The nearest moths are large and crisply cut; the highest are little more than flecks. Her visible eye is closed and her expression is entirely calm, as though this happens at a set time every evening. The surface is a riso print and behaves like one: the blue lays down slightly uneven with faint roller streaks, the white ink sits a hair out of register so every moth carries a thin blue edge on its left side, halftone dots open up through the mid-tones of her cheek, and the paper's tooth shows across the whole flat field. The palette is exactly three values — cobalt, bone white, black — and nothing else is permitted. The composition is vertical and hard-cropped, her head low and left, the moth column occupying the empty upper two thirds. The mood is ceremonial and slightly airless, something private being performed correctly.