The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print
Pelzer-Montada’s essay, grounded in her own practice as a printmaker, focuses on the “surface” textures of contemporary art prints and seeks to reposition printmaking within the spectrum of contemporary visual arts. She argues that printmaking is far more than a mere “multiple reproduction”; its rich material textures and inherent haptic potential set it apart from painting, photography, and new media.
In this essay, she elucidates for me a fundamental question: Why print? What sets printmaking apart from other flat-image media is the accumulation of multiple layers of ink combined with the choice of paper, which together create a unique haptic texture. Drawing on Laura Marks’s concept of “haptic visuality,” she emphasizes that in printmaking the viewer’s eye functions like a tactile organ: as one’s gaze traverses the successive layers of ink and the surface’s raised and recessed textures, it summons a fingertip–like sensory experience. This notion of a “surface in excess” calls to mind the work of the artist Belkis Ayón, who, through networks of meticulously printed dots, weaves together figures and symbols. These dot matrices are not uniform arrays but, through variations in tone and density, evoke a fabric-like quality—allowing viewers to perceive the paper’s subtle undulations visually. As Pelzer-Montada insists, such texture is not merely a visual attribute but also an extension of tactile memory.