Venus takes this confrontation one step further. Where the gazes of her other models are at times glassy, vacant, or even horrified, Venus turns her act of looking out into a reactionary form of recognition and resistance. While being recorded onto a plate or page, Venus with her phone as burin, literally records the artist in her moment of invention. This imaginary photograph becomes the digital palimpsest for Theusner’s striking print. By troubling the passivity of sitting for one’s portrait, Venus destabilises the relationship between artist and model. This reversal is a metonymic representation of category errors, category shifts which the global upheavals (with which Theusner is fixated) have created. However, one cannot help but feel a glimmer of hope in the recognition of revolutionary capability placed in the hands or pockets of all people – with the possibilities for democratising art (and thus politics) which technological advancements offer.

Theusner’s sketchy drypoint lines are swallowed up by the painterly trokes of ink in monotype which colour and add depth to the image. Within these diluted monotype washes – in which we can still see the dappled remnants of water splotches on the plate – masses of ink appear to become liquid again and shift into phantasmagoric shapes and figures. Even in such a straightforwardly figurative piece as this, we see faces in the dark. Is there a shadowy figure skulking across Venus’s chest? Or are our eyes playing tricks on us?

The title of the series, Sweet Bird of Youth, is lifted from a 1959 Tennessee Williams play of the same name. In the diachrony of live performance, Williams’s characters are trapped (or rather abandoned) by the irrepressible flightiness of youth. Theusner’s prints, however, as snapshots of the fossilised moment. In the dialogue between the print and photograph, Theusner dramatises a moment of synchronic invention. This moment, though, is itself troubled by both the implied world outside the image, and by the disjunct in the ways of creating an image: one instantaneous and objective, the other drawn out, reconstructive, and tinged with subjectivity.