As I strode through the Armory at this year’s Print Fair I wondered what it is that makes a print a print, or what it is that only prints can do. It could be the memory of engraving, of scratching into the plates. It could be the sense of reversal, the way images are mirrored horizontally when printed. What I saw at the show only addled me further. Each print reminded me of some other thing: illustration, poster, painting, blueprint, and photograph. In fact the exhibitors themselves might have been confused. Several showed photographic “prints,” and one even showed a formica-and-wood construction by Richard Artschwager that was most certainly not a print.
Lots of the prints were made by painters, moonlighting because they wanted to investigate a different process, because they wanted to produce variations on a single image, because they wanted to reach a different market, or because they just felt like it. (The array of Picasso prints at one booth was so joyous that one believes he just felt like it.) While I think of prints as a graphic medium, of a web of black marks, many are built from broad fields of layered, porous tints that leave tantalizing swatches of paper exposed. The peopled landscapes of Isca Greenfield-Sanders have the freshness of wet watercolors. Prints by Swedish duo Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom, both painters by vocation, fill the frame with strong shapes in eccentric, earthy hues. The scenes have a jittery, improvisatory quality, as if they only came together at the moment the ink hit the paper. That might be something that’s very print-like.