Diane Thodos, “Touching Sadness,” 2005, woodblock monoprint, 12″ x 8 1/2″/Photo: Diane Thodos
Just after the “death of painting,” printmaking nearly shared the same fate. About two decades ago, in the type of brilliantly foresighted move academic departments are known for the world over, printmaking programs across the country traded away their storehouse of tradition to make room for the ink-jets of the future. I know, I have most of Northwestern’s library of lithographic limestone in my printshop. It turns out that most people think giclée is a euphemism for high-end photocopy, and hunger for the real thing has returned with a vengeance. But printmaking remains a niche and seldom are full exhibitions devoted to their display, so it was with much enthusiasm that I received an invitation to Diane Thodos’ “Eros/Thanatos” at Firecat Projects.
The gallery, whose new location on North Damen shares its space with MCM Framing, is not an ideal location to take in the more than thirty prints on display. The space is compact and utilitarian, it’s difficult to get distance from the work, and one is always aware that they are in the midst of functioning business. No matter. What the space lacks in terms of the white-walled sanctity of the modern gallery it makes up for with a kind of cozy domesticity that suggests the very human and humane presence that animates Thodos’ captivating prints.
Diane Thodos, “Demeter,” 2022, monoprint etching, 24″ x 18″/Photo: Diane Thodos
“I was first turned onto printmaking as a student of Stanley William Hayter, Jackson Pollock’s teacher, when I worked at Studio 17 in Paris in 1984.” Thodos told me when I reached out to her about the show.
“He was very serious about the experimental qualities of printmaking and that got under my skin, as did the dynamism of the Surrealist invention of automatism. It opened up a way to get a tremendous amount of subconscious dynamism into my work.”
“Printmaking has since become for me ‘extended drawing’—where a single plate can inspire multiple series of color schemes, painterly techniques and moods, and even multiple lives.”
Vividly hued and highly expressive, Thodos’ prints, such as the blue-green “Demeter” or the warming embrace of her series of “Couples,” seem to leap from their ground in an active display of the artist’s hand and her keen sense of color. Indeed, Thodos has pioneered a collé technique that, by applying translucent hand-tinted prints to a separate bright white substrate, glows with the intensity of stained glass. And like that sacred art, these works radiate joy, energy and the optimism of the possible. They represent the life-affirming Eros of the exhibition’s title. On the opposite wall hangs the darker, more sinister forces of Thanatos, the personification of death.
Diane Thodos, “Weeping Woman,” 2004, woodblock, 14″ x 11″/Photo: Diane Thodos
Temperamentally and technically divergent, these Thanatos-fueled works feature a preponderance of blacks, browns and ochres, and often a higher degree of abstraction. In several of her woodcuts, notably “Touching Sadness” and “Weeping Woman,” Thodos has so thoroughly assimilated the techniques of the German expressionists that it is difficult to believe that they are contemporary incarnations of the practice. But unlike postmodern artists who so frequently sampled past styles as ironic selections from the buffet of art’s history, Thodos inhabits the manner and the technique with visible and refreshing sincerity.
“I feel as they did, that what I create has to be the outward expression of inward feeling.”
“For me, art could not hold any interest without having an emotional reality connected to one’s authentic inner emotional self.” Thodos continued “This is why both German and American abstract expression held such a magnetic power over me.”
“Expressive satisfaction comes from the fact that drawing directly on a plate or a block connects with the spontaneity of your nervous system, which becomes imprinted in the medium. This is something that drawing on an iPad or reproducing an image as a giclée print or on a digital printer cannot do.”
Indeed, amidst the tidal wave of under-felt and over-intellectualized art compounded by reality-threatening AI-generated slop, “Eros/Thanatos” is a stunning reminder of what it means to be human.
“Diane Thodos: Eros/Thanatos” is on view through November 9 at Firecat Projects, 2109 North Damen.
