Anton Wurth at C.G. Boerner

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One of the cleverest, most stirring shows I've seen recently was also the most arcane. Mounted at C.G. Boerner, known mainly for old master prints--though the gallery has occasionally, if only recently, ventured into showing contemporary material--was a project one year in the making, in which the Berlin-based German engraver and book artist Anton Wurth fashioned a "dialogue" with the 17th--century French artist Robert Nanteuil, engraver to king and court. On view were a dozen or so prints by Nanteuil, portraits all, depicting various important personages in oval frames adorned with laurel, ribbons and inscriptions, and surrounded by additional honorific trappings. Wurth responded to Nanteuil with two suites of his own engravings, one set of four and another of eight. The four are smaller and vertical (ca. 14 by 9 3/4 inches) and were intended as experiments that Wurth decided in the end to edition (in 10). The eight are larger and horizontal (ca. 14 by 19 1/2 inches), in an edition of 12. All are abstract, consist horizontal lines interspersed with schematic bows, hearts, flowers, arabesques or fleurs-de-lis.

Engraving is purely linear; passages of light and dark result from varying densities of cross-hatching or parallels carved directly into the copperplate. In the case of Nanteuil, the lines are mostly parallel; and remarkable indeed, given this limitation, is the enormous range of shading and texture he mastered, particularly in hair and skin. Wurth, however, was uninterested in creating direct correspondences. His prints are highly conceptual "portraits" of Nanteuil's very pursuit; at their center is merely an absence marked by the vacant ovals, a clue, as it were, to the idealized nature of the project.

Despite his rarefied concept, however, Wurth's prints have a delicate and quirky physicality. His decorative vignettes, the result of adding a few more parallel lines in key spots, materialize as a kind of buzz in the screenlike ground. In turn, the shapes allude to the decorative details and emblems in the Baroque prints, which are key to their function of indicating the power and prestige of the sitters. It is a spirited give-and-take in both form and content, a welcome alternative to the more heavy-handed historicism often found in contemporary art.

Wurth's bookmaking experience was apparent in an elegant dual-language (German and English) catalogue he prepared for the show, as meticulously conceived in its texts as in its format, designed in abutting columns of roman and italic typography. The texts include maxims on engraving by Nanteuil, translated by Wurth, along with Wurth's own theoretically tinged meditations on their shared metier.

Wurth hones Nanteuil's formula to its essence, and the resulting images are both minimal and laden with an intellectual and perceptual complexity that sideswipes their apparent naivete. Yet they remain light and humorous. They also exploit the quality of breathing on the page that is the particular property of the beautifully engraved line. Though abstract, they sat on the wall as veritable beings, no less fully embodied in their own way than those of Nanteuil.--Faye Hirsch

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