Access a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Marilee Talkington: This work by Gego from 1966 is titled "Litografia plegada," or "Folded Lithograph." It is a horizontally oriented accordion book about eight inches tall that opens and stretches about eight feet left to right. The folds of the pages are uneven and zigzagging. Peaks and valleys disrupt the viewer’s expectation of the conventional binding technique. The book is mostly monochromatic: white and light grays with long swatches of yellow are printed across the pages.

The book covers are square and bound in gray cloth. The book is displayed with the inside of the covers flipped open to reveal their exposed white cardboard bodies framed with a raised border. The frame is bound with a light-gray cloth and is lightly peppered with rust-colored stains that bloom around the edges. Both covers have light-gray lettering in all capitals—the only text that appears on the book. The left cover reads: “Gego Litografia Plegada” along the top of the square. This translates to “Gego Folded Lithograph.”

The right features text in Spanish that translates to: “Original by Gego. This edition consists of twenty numbered copies, two essay proofs, two artist’s proofs and a "bon a tirer" [which is a French term for a printer’s proof] printed by hand by the ‘master printer’ Clifford Smith at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles. In 1966 it was made on J. Green Paper and bounded by the Schuberth Bookbindery in San Francisco, California. Copy.”

The book’s pages carefully fold at seemingly random intervals and directions. The pages have a cohesive design printed across their pages, a horizontally oriented abstract landscape in a subtle color palette of whites, creams, and a pale yellow. The background is a uniform eggshell white. At first glance, it appears to be the color of the unbleached paper until you see a border of exposed surface on the top and bottom of the page that is a cool gray.

On top of the white background are three long broken bands of pale yellow. Moving left to right, the yellow begins at the top left as a circular shape, approximately three inches in diameter, before streaked into two splotchy bands of color. The yellow ends abruptly at a fold and then appears again at the bottom of the composition for the middle two quarters, traversing across six pages. The thick wavering lines disappear behind a folded page and reappear at the top of the composition for the right fourth of the piece. The overall effect might resemble transcripts of Morse code or abstracted musical scoring.

Printed on top of the image are semitransparent white lines. The lines are smaller and thinner than the yellow splotches but vary in size and orientation. They gather, wiggle, and curve across the long horizontal picture plane like the ghostly remnants of fingerprints. The effect is subtle so that the individual lines do not register from a far distance but rather create the illusion of depth within the flat graphic yellow shapes.

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