Looking at the Sea (bobalicón)

The parenthetical "bobalicón" — Spanish for "simpleton" or "great fool" — directly cites Goya's etching and aquatint Bobalicón from Los Disparates (The Follies, c. 1815–1819), in which a hulking figure looms in a darkened landscape. By annexing Goya's title, Poskovic places his marine subject in conversation with Spanish printmaking's late Romantic vein, importing Goya's tone of grotesque allegory into a contemporary woodcut. The composition likely centers on a figure or figures observing the sea — a Romantic motif that Goya himself inverts by making his observer a heavy-bodied innocent. Poskovic's color woodcuts of this period are produced from multiple registered blocks on large-format paper; the seascape genre admits broad horizontal bands of carved tone that reward this multi-block layering. The reference to Goya, recurring across Poskovic's titles, signals his sustained engagement with the European print tradition as a counterweight to the American academic context in which he has worked since joining the University of Michigan faculty.