SANDRINE GUÉRIN By Faye Hirsch Untitled (mountains) (2001), a soft-ground etching in an edition of 23 plus five artist’s and three printers’ proofs. The sheet of Hahnemühle Bright White Copperplate paper measures 32-1/2x48-1/4 in.; each of the 31 images with which it is printed measures 3x4 in. It was printed by Felix Harlan and Carol Weaver, assisted by Maggie Wright, at Harlan & Weaver, Inc., New York. “It’s a labor of love,” say publishers Mark Baron and Élise Boisanté of this deceptively airy and light-spirited etching, which was nonetheless treacherous to print. Really it’s more like 31 prints, for the artist created 31 plates that were imprinted in a grid of four rows of eight, minus one at the end. Guérin, an artist whose main medium is photography used a rather unconventional method to create what looks like a sequence of grainy black-and-white landscapes: cutting small mountain-like shapes out of Styrofoam, she pressed them into soft-ground, which perfectly registered the mottled, spongy surfaces. To guess this was the method is well-nigh impossible, though: the little landscapes are truly inscrutable, sensually curvaceous in one, jagged in another; fantastical, abstract, surreal, and naturalistic by turn; the small frames together offering a kind of meditative viewing. No such luck for the printers who had to ink and wipe every single bevel-edged plate with each run through the press, taking care that nothing moved. Here, then, is one of etching’s great tricks: to disguise a virtuoso feat as an effortless game. Published by Baron/Boisanté Editions, New York.