Paul D. MacIntyre

The following documentation was made with help from contemporary artist Peter Denton. Visit www.peter.io to see his artwork.

In the winter of 2015 I came across an inexpensive anthology of Albrecht Dürer woodcuts by happenstance at a local bookstore. A Dover publication from 2004, Great Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer contained reduced versions of most of the artist’s important early work. I typically enjoy woodcuts for their simplicity and stark materiality, yet I was especially drawn to the eight Apocalypse images selected for reproduction. They felt old while also strangely current, almost like satirical cartoons. I remember noting their ironic poignancy: how odd that images of the end best captured the zeitgeist of a period in the throes of modernity’s infancy. Moreover, there was something agitating about their psychological makeup, a subtle ideological dissonance that teetered between utopian ambition and restless overcompensation. As if symptomatic of a cultural horror vacui, their anxious overabundance echoed the intensity of their subject matter. Like powerful rockets housed in underbuilt shells, Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts were nearly overwhelmed by their own visual propulsion.

Later that autumn I began to dissect Dürer’s Apocalypse. Using a precision knife, I removed the eight prints from the Dover anthology and cut each of them into 4,368 units (the smallest I could comfortably handle) following the logics of a variety of mathematically determined grids: some works rely on the square, others the triangle. I then drew eight corresponding grids in graphite—scaled-up to the size of the original woodcuts—onto eight pieces of white cotton paper. Finally, I systematically collaged each fragment onto its equivalent segment. As each drawn grid is larger than its partner, the equidistant white space between the units reveals the rationale of each network. 

The following documentation was made with help from contemporary artist Peter Denton. Visit www.peter.io to see his artwork.