Working under the banner of Inferior Works, an artist with a long background in fine art production and print resurrects the discipline of pre-digital mechanical paste-up in an A2 box-framed mixed media work that operates as both forensic reconstruction and layered object for anyone who never worked with a scalpel and a wax roller.
Before the early 1990s, artwork for litho printing was physically built: scaled, shot, processed, trimmed and assembled by hand. The precision of that process, the Rotring pens and crop marks, the PMTs shot on AGFA bellows cameras, the careful alignment achieved with hot wax rollers and Cow Gum, the non-repro blue guidelines that only the camera could not see, has since been almost entirely erased by the efficiencies of the screen. What survives mostly as a misdirected search term once described a precise, demanding craft. The Freudian Slip treats it as a subject.
Made under the banner of Inferior Works, the work is a deliberately exaggerated paste-up at twice working size. Everything is amplified: board thickness, Rotring pen strokes, crop marks and guidelines all looming with what the artist describes as architectural confidence. The halftone figure at the composition’s centre is enlarged to make the dot unapologetic, anchoring the work in the visual language of offset printing. Simulated bromides and PMTs have been digitally distressed to reproduce the familiar failures of the darkroom: slight overexposure, soft focus, generational degradation, the yellowing that followed poor rinsing or simple time. Modified Letraset dry-transfer lettering forms the title, its presence both affectionate and faintly absurd.
The colour is an in-joke for anyone who knows. Paste-ups were monochrome artefacts: colour was resolved later through plate separation. Here, colour refuses that logic and exposes the artifice, a moment of deliberate anachronism that signals the work’s knowing relationship to its own historical reconstruction. The pulp-derived subject matter plays against the seriousness of the method in a similar way. Kitsch content, forensic process.
The work operates, as the artist describes, on two levels simultaneously. For those fluent in analogue print repro, it is a precise reconstruction of a vanished workflow, every element placed as it would have been. For everyone else, it is a tactile, layered object whose processes invite explanation. That dual register, the specialist reading and the open one, is what gives the Paste-up series its reach.
Inferior Works is the ongoing practice of an artist with a long background in fine art production, print and visual design. The name is both an alias and a quiet protest against the hierarchies of the art world. Unique, numbered multiples of The Freudian Slip and other works in the Paste-up series are available to order.
ARTIST LINKS
inferiorworks.art
@inferior_works
The Freudian Slip, 2025. Mixed media, A2 box frame. Inferior Works. One of an expanding series of enlarged paste-ups.
