Literature

Working in the same two-colour intaglio method that structures her landscape practice throughout the 1980s, Irene Scheinmann here constructs a world that belongs to no identifiable geography. Three moons of varying scale are distributed across a deep blue star-field, their surfaces built in fine stippled texture, each body positioned at a different depth in the composition's recession. The foreground is formed by softly undulating terrain, rendered in cool white against the deep blue ground through careful tonal modulation. The technical precision of the aquatint, the controlled acid biting that produces the star-field's even luminosity, is held in productive tension with the strangeness of the image's premise: a sky populated by multiple moons, a landscape that could belong to no particular continent or era. For Scheinmann, the lunar offered a territory outside the claims of nation and history, a place that displacement could not reach.