Lamentation over the Dead Christ, a print by Hercules Segers (ca. 1589–1638), is one of just two religious images among the couple hundred prints he is known to have made.

The rest of Segers’ prints are, for the most part, landscapes. He favored mountains–or more precisely, cliffs and valleys of heavily bouldered rock. The rockfaces densely textured. He obsessively iterated materials and invented techniques: making painted prints, printed paintings, experimenting with variously colored plates, printing with brown ink on ochred linens and fabrics, using cut and re-tooled plates, counterproofs and negative images. The residue of his experiments sometimes appear: cross-hatched emergences in the sky. The resulting images are hallucinatory, accretions of atmosphere. Critics call his landscapes “lunar,” "otherworldly," “extraterrestrial.” Famously, Segers never traveled. He lived in the lowlands, in the Golden Age of Dutch realist painting, making images entirely imagined.

Because Segers might otherwise sit outside the art history canon, critics often like to note that Rembrandt not only owned several of his pieces but even reworked one: Rembrandt drew over Segers’s etching Tobias and the Angel (ca. 1630-1633) in drypoint to create his own piece, Flight Into Egypt (ca. 1653). One can see how the Angel’s fluttered wings in the foreground of Segers’ piece are reworked as arched and swaying treetop canopies in the middle ground of the Rembrandt. 

If Rembrandt domesticates Segers’ angel into a traditional landscape, the pieces in this exhibition may be said to make the opposite gesture: magnifying the material of unearthly flight. The density of markmaking used to depict the angel’s wings in Segers is mirrored by the wrinkled folds of the kapton. Werner Herzog called Segers’ prints “searchlights” into the “recesses of the self.” The kaptons chart a similar territory. There are rivulets, flashes of light, dark crevasses, summits and valleys, shattered surface. Patchworks of lineation filled with a kinetic, inter-planetary energy. Gold ground. “States of mind.” What Segers might call landscapes.

- Emily Villano