Riccardo Iacono

A woodblock portrait of a named male sitter by Andrea G. Artz, produced through mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based technique she has adopted alongside her photographic and sculptural practice. The portrait is built from a sequence of separately carved blocks, each printed in registration via kentō marks and inked with water-based pigment mixed with rice paste. Color appears in flat, slightly absorbed planes rather than as continuous photographic tone, and the cumulative effect depends on the precision with which each successive impression is aligned. Artz, originally trained as a portrait photographer and now based in London, treats this slow, layered procedure as a deliberate counterweight to the immediacy of digital capture: the same likeness is recovered, but only through repeated handwork. The print sits within a portrait series that extends across the sitters in her circle, and it shares the formal vocabulary of her wider practice — a sustained interest in the figure, rendered through whichever medium most resists the photograph's instantaneousness.