“Printing Darkness”
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel St.
Through Dec. 7, 2025
Por la unidad, Jaime Alfredo Mereles’s woodcut print from 1965, is a classic of its genre. Its strong lines and bold forms reveal Mereles as a terrific artist and craftsman working in a robust tradition. As an accompanying note states, “like many of his Mexican contemporaries active midcentury” — and like many Mexican woodcut artists today — Mereles “confronted issues of political justice in his work. The date of this print suggests that it relates to the Chicano Movement, which began in 1965 as a civil rights and empowerment lobby for Mexican-American farmworkers. Mereles’s aggressive parallel gouges of the linoleum block and deep black inking emphasize his powerful message of protest, reminding us of the ability of images to shape attitudes and effect social change.” Mereles’s mastery of his craft translates to a mastery in communicating his message.
Por la unidad is part of “Printing Darkness,” an exhibition of prints running now through Dec. 7 at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., that explores one way technical achievement and emotional connection can go hand in hand.
“At its most elementary level, printmaking relies on the contrast between dark and light,” an accompanying note states. “Each technique approaches this dynamic differently, from the strong contrasts possible in woodcut to the feathery marks of etching.” The show “surveys the fundamental role of ‘darkness’ in printmaking from the 16th century to the present day. The works portray moments of shadow, twilight, and gloom to explore atmospheres ranging from the menacing and mysterious to the tranquil and spiritual. Yet they simultaneously reveal that it is only in darkness that light can become fully apparent, whether as literal illumination or as enlightening metaphor of inspiration, clarity, and resistance.”
The note undersells, however, some of the more hallucinatory possibilities printmaking opens up. John Martin’s 1828 work The Deluge renders an apocalyptic flood scene in subtle and vivid detail, with the medium adding power by suggesting, perhaps even more to the modern eye, that what we’re looking at is a illustration from an old newspaper. “This fantastical episode recalls the story of the great flood from the book of Genesis,” a note explains, “but it also refers to the belief shared by many 19th-century naturalists that, at some point in Earth’s history, the sun, the moon, and a comet collided to create a cataclysmic deluge.”
“Printing Darkness” thankfully includes a couple of choice works by towering 19th-century Spanish artist Francisco Goya, who excelled in a few different media at creating engrossing, unsettling scenes through dramatic use of light and shadow. His most famous series of prints, The Disasters of War, document, with the keen eye of a photojournalist and the outrage of a feeling, thinking human, the atrocities committed by soldiers in Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1808 invasion of Spain, which led to the Peninsular War of 1808 to 1814 that encompassed a famine in Madrid in the winter of 1812. But Goya also deployed more phantasmagoric modes of showing turmoil that could be as affecting. “Working at a time of political and religious violence and tumult, Francisco Goya depicted his own interpretations of social traumas using fantastical pictures from his imagination,” a note relates. “In these dreamlike — or rather, nightmarish — narrative cycles, Goya takes full advantage of different printmaking techniques, often layering them to increase the ambiguity and nebulous aspects of these stories, which continue to resist explanation.” The Disasters of War hewed closer to printmaking’s dual role as both an artwork and a process for disseminating information. But even Goya’s more surreal works didn’t lose the sense that they were dispatches, even if from another world.
French printmaker Albert Besnard followed a similar path to Goya with his 19th-century print series Woman, which deployed a “looser, more psychologically charged Impressionist approach” to trace “numerous episodes that he believed could impact modern womanhood, from the joys of romantic love to the agonies of childbirth. He deployed pockets of etched lines to cast portions of his scenes in ambiguous darkness.” His depictions of rape are shocking in their matter-of-factness; the violation speaks for itself. So too does the difficult, compassionate illustration of a woman at the very beginning of a jump off a bridge. The nearby carriage, bearing the only possible witnesses and chance of intervention, has already passed. The darkness she’s tilting into suggests that she has already made her choice, and there is no going back.
The show traces how printmaking moved into the 20th century as readily as other art forms did, becoming ever more adventurous. James McBey’s Zero Hour-A Sixty-Five Pounder Opening Fire, from 1920, “captures ‘hour zero’ of a military operation during the First World War. In the dark foreground, three British soldiers set off a powerful cannon, launching a sixty-five-pound projectile. As one soldier ignites the fuse, the other two cover their ears to dull the sound of the explosion. The bright white light of the blast dominates the composition, and the unfathomable extent of the destruction is suggested by the absence of marks on the paper.” That the image is almost all white lends it that much more effectiveness, giving a sense of the way the combat in World War I could seem to blot out the world.
Similarly, Käthe Kollwitz’s 1922 Das Volk, from her woodcut series Krieg (War), uses “simplified forms and stark contrast between light and dark to convey the profound suffering of the First World War, in which her son Peter died. The series begins with an allegory of Death leading Peter and his fellow recruits to their doom,” while “the remaining civilian population of elders, women, and children grieve their terrible losses. A toddler’s head emerges from a blanket of darkness … looking directly at the viewer with a blank gaze.” As with previous examples, Kollwitz’s technical facility, her ability to render flat black fields and crisp edges, makes the image that much more emotionally affecting.
The most recent images in the show tend also to be the most abstract; contemporary printmakers, like artists in other fields, have already spent decades with the understanding that the medium can be the message, and that a print can be most successful when it leans into what printing does best — create striking, contrasting fields of light and darkness. Yet even at its most experimental, the medium never loses touch with its newsy roots. Fred Wilson’s 2004 piece We Are All in the Gutter, but Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars, titled after a quote from Oscar Wilde, “explores the relationship between Black characters across the sprawling 19th-century literary canon…. The scattered ink spots, which Wilson created by dropping acid from varying heights, recall Wilde’s complex plot structure. They symbolize characters of color taken out of their isolated contexts and placed in dialogue for the first time on a page.”
Meanwhile, Sue Coe’s 1984 piece, Woman Walks into Bar — Is Raped by 4 Men on the Pool Table — While 20 Watch uses stark blacks and whites to both tell what happened and convey the emotions she feels and wants the viewer to feel as well. “Coe noted that this portrayal of a gang rape stemmed from her ‘extreme fury’ at both the cruelty of the perpetrators and the inaction of the mute witnesses. Her artwork is part of her therapy, and she demands that beholders share in her outrage at violence, hatred, and oppression,” a note relates. Printing Darkness shows that Coe is working in a deep tradition of using printmaking this way. Like Goya, Besnard, and Kollwitz before her, she deploys deft technical skill to stoke a strong emotion. The message she sends has been sent before, but still needs repeating.
“Printing Darkness” runs at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through Dec. 7. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information. Admission is free.
