Derrick Guild RSA is an artist who has always steeped himself not only in the history of art but also in the history of making. In a conversation in late April he insisted that one of his primary concerns was to open out how Dürer’s images were made, so people could see the process for themselves. The original plan had been to laser cut the fifteen images onto lino and then print them, one on top of the other, so that the resulting composite image was simply black. This would have brought into play Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and some fears of the death of representative art at the time that image appeared, during an era of global conflict and systemic revolutionary change.
Guild’s large-scale reproductions – for example Positive Negative – encourage us to look more at the rich and layered details of the original, by means of comparison, and to consider the different qualities of the same lines rendered by different technologies, over five centuries apart. In a work such as The Apocalyptic Woman, A Positive Negative, the artist uses colour as another means to oblige the viewer to look again at a familiar image, rendering the print in a sepia-tinted gold. It’s perhaps a nod and a wink to the artifice of managing ageing, but in reverse. Here the ‘aged’ status of the image is emphasised through colour, which means we have to spend time accustoming ourselves to a camouflaged familiar. A similar tactic is at play in the jokingly named Magnificent Seven – a piece embossed and gold-painted. The breaking of the Seven Seals was believed in the past to initiate the irreversible process of the Apocalypse.
However, it is perhaps Guild’s work 1 January 1500 which is the most affecting: a simple depopulated landscape; the sky an undulating white. This is an image born out of subtraction and erasure – the remove of the dense layering and obsessively rendered detail, just to present an image of nature ‘at rest’ after humanity. It is an image often thought of after a catastrophic event, such as the return to primeval status of forests in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. These woodlands will be unable to be visited safely by humans for centuries to come. It is easy to imagine the end of the world and the awful experiences that those who are present will live through, but much harder to imagine the steady disappearance of all traces of human presence in the centuries that will follow.
Extract from Reveal - A Methodical Apocalypse by Jon Blackwood
