We usually use the phrase "heroic format" to refer to large-scale painting, that is, to describe something unusual and that requires unusual intellectual and physical effort from its author, as well as spaciousness in the workspace, availability of a support suitable and abundant inputs. We are not sure if it can be applied to the field of engraving but we take the liberty of doing it for lack of a better one because, in our environment, making a huge print is not only equivalent to putting on an "eleven-stick shirt" in regards to the space available in the engraver's workshop –not to mention necessarily having to print it by hand, that is, at the tip of a spoon– but, in turn, triggers an eminently material problem: where do we get a sheet of paper? to your measure? And the crucial question: will someone be interested enough to be encouraged to buy it? And if so: will it have a wall to hang it on?
We are not sure if the five artists gathered on this occasion have faced the same questions but the truth is that by engraving and printing such large woodcuts they have not only made a noticeable difference with the standard production of their colleagues but they must have discovered the virtues exhibitions of large-format engraving: the masterful way in which he solves the montage, imposing himself on the gallery space, compartmentalizing it with his mere presence and offering the viewer an experience of contemplation to his measure and without the mediation of glass by dispensing, inevitably, with framing .
The artists Marco Herrera Fernández, Carlos Llerena Aguirre, Martín Moratillo Andrade, Gloria Quispe Tinco, and Luis Torres Villar develop proposals thematically different from each other, but they coincide in the execution of woodcuts that cannot go unnoticed due to their large scale, ratifying their irrevocable commitment to engraving as a means of contemporary creation.
Manuel Munive,
Curator
Museo del Grabado, ICPNA
