The image is striking, but so simple, composed from so little, that it draws you in. You want to get close, almost to hold a magnifying glass to it, because it seems incomprehensible that there isn't more to the marks of which it consists. What do you see? A void, interrupted by gathered clusters of lines. The lines are black, the void simply the colour of the paper on which the image appears (cream), made darker or lighter in places by dilute washes of grey.

The artist's patient dedication to a process is apparent throughout, although it is a dedication of a kind that seems hard to define. Focusing on those areas where the lines in the image are most thickly concentrated, where, say, a sequence of horizontal marks has been set down most insistently, they seem entirely abstract: a gesture has been repeated many times (each time slightly differently) - not, it would appear, obsessively, but almost absent- mindedly, as if doodled.

Pull back from close focus, however, and you note the figurative precision that has resulted from the sum of all these tiny repeated marks. They combine to create a picture, which is easily read. A toreador, swathed in his cloak so that he cannot move his arms, dodges a charging bull; an audience watches.

The 14th plate in Goya's series of prints, the Tauromaquia, is a moving, desolate image. It is more than a picture of a man in combat with a bull. It looks dreamed, and carries with it that sense of undeclared meaning which dreams often possess. The image's effectiveness derives, no doubt, from Goya's mastery of printmaking - but that takes us little closer to understanding how and why it works.

Goya's Tauromaquia (the whole sequence can currently be seen at the Blason Gallery)...

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