Les malheurs de sophisme

The title puns on the Comtesse de Ségur's nineteenth-century children's classic Les malheurs de Sophie (The Misfortunes of Sophie), substituting sophisme — sophistry, fallacious reasoning — for the protagonist's name. The wordplay signals a satirical or philosophical subject, in keeping with a strain of contemporary French mokuhanga that uses the medium's quiet, deliberate process to address ideas rather than landscape or figure subjects in the traditional Japanese mode. Water-based woodblock lends itself to text-image combinations and flat planes of color through nishiki-e style multi-block printing, where each color requires a separate carved block registered to kento marks. Rodride's practice sits within the French tradition of estampe — fine art printmaking with a literary and conceptual dimension — adapted to the materials and procedures of mokuhanga. Without the image to confirm specific compositional choices, the title alone places the work in the discursive register that distinguishes much European mokuhanga from the meisho-e or kacho-e traditions of Edo and Meiji Japan.