The conceptual simplification of complex states is often an instantaneous operation. The very act of perceiving, of heeding, is of a selective order; every attention, every fixation of our conscience, implies a deliberate omission of what is uninteresting. We see and hear by means of remembrances, fears, foresight. In all corporeal matters, unconsciousness is a necessity of physical acts.
Jorge Luis Borges 1
Borges urges that "the conceptual simplification of complex states is often an instantaneous operation" but the execution of a print, in mezzotint alone or in combination with other print process, is never instantaneous. The execution of a print is a series of processes, protracted in duration, that employ innumerable perceptions, decisions, judgments, through which thought assumes visible form. In his artist book 96-01, Souto writes of the surface of the copper plate as a memory surface. Every mark is the trace of the visible form of thought in working on a copperplate. The plate is a synecdoche for the flatbed, a picture plane regarded as a surface on which an image accumulates, analogous to the plate itself placed on the flat bed of a press for printing. 2
Heidegger urges in the "Origin of the Work of Art" that the artwork opens a world and holds open the Open of the world. 3 In the act that equiprimordially creates agent qua artist and artwork, opening the world of the artwork entails filling a void. In mezzotints, the void is the deep, rich, velvety black of the copper plate covered with the burrs left by the mezzotint rocker. Filling the black void of the mezzotint plate means working with scrapper and burnisher to smooth the burr-covered surface, bringing lighter values out of the dense blackness. Mezzotint lends itself to the dramatic tenebrism of Caravaggioesque chiaroscuro, subtlety of value transitions, long gray scale, and meticulous attention to detailed description. Its syntax is particularly suited to description both where a fully modeled form is rendered and where judicious placement of specular and broad highlights are adequate to suggest volume, the quality of a surface material and the direction and character of the light source.
Thus in Setting II, 2003, the specular highlights on the polished metal of the plumb bob and the edge of the burnisher in the left section are descriptive of the form of the objects, while the dramatic rim lighting on the contour of the artist's nose, hand and sleeve define the forms and separate them from the background. In Setting, 2003, one notes the luminosity of the value surrounding the plumb bob, the reversal of value serving to define the shape of the object. In La vocaión II, 2000, the working artist is again the ostensible content.
Self-Portrait I, 2000 and Self-Portrait II, 2000, combine mezzotint with a surround printed by lithography and screenprint, forming a parergon 4 of commentary on the central mezzotint image. This textual and visual metareflection on the ergon of the work itself forms a transition between the interiority of the mezzotint image and the exteriority beyond the sheet of the print, analogous to and reiterating within the work the liminality of the shift between the interior of the frame and the exterior of the frame-i.e., between the world of the artwork and the viewer's world-space. The parergon surrounding the central mezzotint is, like the work itself, an exteriorization, but an exteriorization declaring itself as such.
Much the same layering of content obtains in Souto's two artist books, 96-01, 2001 and Materia Prima, 2001. Here, the opportunity for spatialization of image and text as image and metacommentary includes juxtaposition, embedding, sequencing, layering as overprinting and as overlays, foldouts. This spatialization is also a temporalization, for the work unfolds in space and in time as one handles it. That one must handle the book form in order to fully experience it, rather than view it with a detached regard, is central to the experience of artists' books, for it makes the work proximal, tactile, and private rather than distal, visual, and simultaneously intersubjective.
The setting up of the world of these works is their setting, the setting to work in doing the work, a thematization of the medium as content, not only with respect to the mezzotint process and the other print processes brought to bear in the facture of the works, but with respect for the labor and intensity entailed in their facture. It is this honoring of process that is finally the work of these works.