Black Portrait

A woman's face built the way a low-resolution image is — from blocks of colour, pixels you can actually see. But there's no screen here. This is a monotype on paper, printing inks rolled onto the matrix and pressed by hand, again and again, through a graphic press. Pixels lifted off the glowing display and given a physical body.

We spend our lives looking at pixels; it felt honest to bring them into something you can hold and live with.

I work the way a musician plays jazz — the rules of printmaking in front of me like notes, and then a moment of relaxation where I improvise, letting in a flaw that etching would never allow. That imperfection is exactly where the life is.

She belongs to a series — one face was never enough. An original monotype, signed.

Jolanta Johnsson