Matt Saunders | Birkin Rosso

Matt Saunders continually explores the profound impact of images and the act of looking itself. A constant state of experimentation unfolds in his prints, and as a reflection of his artistic process, the results remain open-ended.

The predominant motif of the series Birkin Rosso is inspired by actress Jane Birkin (1946-2023) and her role in the 1976 film Je t’aime moi non plus. Birkin’s character, the androgynous waitress Johnny, has featured in several of Saunders’ previous works and continues to be a source of inspiration for him.

Birkin Rosso, 2025 comprises a sequence of thirteen interconnected prints. Individually, the prints are enigmatic, self-contained mysteries, but when viewed together they inform and enrich each other. By repeating and yet varying the same subject, Saunders emphasises how still and moving images are linked; their seriality enhances the cinematic impression when viewed one after the other. In a particular scene from the film, Birkin’s character is lying in a bathtub. Saunders explores the experience of heightened sensation in the shifting space between submerging under water and emerging again, as he depicts the figure in this liminal moment.

When Saunders began the series, he was eager to experiment and push the boundaries of traditional printmaking techniques. The series evolved through variations of the same elements, echoing the work of sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), who is another key source of inspiration in Saunders’ work. Rosso’s sculptures are characterised by the same ambiguity of matter and space found in Saunders’ prints. The faces portrayed in Rosso’s work seem to appear and disappear simultaneously, highlighting that visual experience is an active negotiation, where the viewer does not passively receive the work of art, but is instead an active co-determining participant in what is visible. Much of Rosso’s practice involved photography at various stages of his creative process. His obsession with light, as one of his main materials, meant he often photographed and rephotographed his sculptures in different modes. Working with the same subject matter across multiple media was a radical approach at the time and has continued to fascinate and inspire Saunders.

Saunders combines photogravure with woodcut in the series Birkin Rosso; two techniques rarely seen together. He approached the photogravure plates with a refreshingly experimental attitude, exposing the plates with gestural marks painted on transparencies, and incorporating textures from a topography of textiles draped on the plates. These experiments were then combined with the fine grain of woodcut prints. The floating space of each print is revealed through Saunders’ sculpting with light directly on the printing plates, reminiscent of the spirit of Rosso’s métier. In each print within the series, the figure materialises and erodes simultaneously, evoking a sense of being underwater or in a state of flux.