Fascination with etchings
Monday, 02 June 2014 18:06
Written by Angélica Abelleyra
Her lines have a life of their own, an intimate, warm, winding, delicate existence that is skin and woman, fruit and sex, sign and question. Between figuration and abstract features, whether in etching, drawing or painting, Nunik Sauret (DF, 1951) pursues her fascination with art. She is as enthusiastic about her profession as when she was 17 and made grooves in a plaque and then saw the image printed on paper emerge from the press, with a variety of registers and tremendous force.
She began painting but always felt that she lacked skill, until in her third year she met the artist Octavio Bajonero and became committed to etching, an activity about which she is still passionate. In the free workshop of the Santo Domingo mill, she began to learn about the alchemy of plaques, acids, gouges, plates and paper. She also discovered the work of other etchers, exhibited her own and made a smooth transition from student to professional artist.
Ever since, she has been fascinated by the human figure and above all the female presence in her pieces of tempera on egg, etching or aquatint. Why women? Because of the connection with her very being, and in order to break the social, sexual and religious taboos linked to “femininity.”
In this way, with an effective technique in all categories of etching (though wood and stone have not attracted her as strongly), in addition to her skill in the age-old pictorial skill of egg tempera, Sauret displays her process of revealing who, how and why we are…
Using her preferred technique, dry point, she sees herself as retrieving the deserters of etching, shaking them from their complacency and pushing them to experiment in this universe that values collective work.
Reflective but impulse-driven, she moves back and forth between the slow, intimate, intellectual practice of etching and the more direct, corporeal activity of painting. However, in both she distances herself somewhat from open figuration. Moreover, without losing the human quality, she produces organic shapes, plays with geometry and creates landscapes or signs, in a rich, ever changing creative process.
Text originally published in La Jornada Semanal (February 2, 2003).
She began painting but always felt that she lacked skill, until in her third year she met the artist Octavio Bajonero and became committed to etching, an activity about which she is still passionate. In the free workshop of the Santo Domingo mill, she began to learn about the alchemy of plaques, acids, gouges, plates and paper. She also discovered the work of other etchers, exhibited her own and made a smooth transition from student to professional artist.
Ever since, she has been fascinated by the human figure and above all the female presence in her pieces of tempera on egg, etching or aquatint. Why women? Because of the connection with her very being, and in order to break the social, sexual and religious taboos linked to “femininity.”
In this way, with an effective technique in all categories of etching (though wood and stone have not attracted her as strongly), in addition to her skill in the age-old pictorial skill of egg tempera, Sauret displays her process of revealing who, how and why we are…
Using her preferred technique, dry point, she sees herself as retrieving the deserters of etching, shaking them from their complacency and pushing them to experiment in this universe that values collective work.
Reflective but impulse-driven, she moves back and forth between the slow, intimate, intellectual practice of etching and the more direct, corporeal activity of painting. However, in both she distances herself somewhat from open figuration. Moreover, without losing the human quality, she produces organic shapes, plays with geometry and creates landscapes or signs, in a rich, ever changing creative process.
Text originally published in La Jornada Semanal (February 2, 2003).