Cosentinoworks presents the Hands Series by multimedia artist and educator Daniel Cosentino, a body of work that fuses historical and experimental processes through visual print. These mixed media artworks integrate palladium printing, intaglio etching, and hand-applied metal leaf, including gold, silver, and copper, to evoke a layered expression of gesture, presence, and silence.
Emerging from themes of the latent image and the ephemeral quality of touch, these prints act as both index and artifact. They are not illustrations but accumulations, built through process, surface, and repetition. The hand appears as a trace, a residual form rendered in light and metal, reflecting a conceptual inquiry into the tension between material permanence and spiritual disappearance.
The impulse for this series began with a contemplation on silence. I was trying to reach a state of stillness and quiet, but I quickly realized that silence is rarely empty. It was filled with fragments—memories, stories, and lines from texts that had stayed with me. I came to understand silence as something active, something shaped by attention and the accumulation of experience.
This series became a way to explore that idea through layered visual processes. I use laser-etched intaglio plates that are printed traditionally with ink, often on top of hand-coated palladium emulsions. Metal leaf—gold, silver, or copper—is then applied by hand. These materials are chosen for their surface qualities and how they reflect light. They are also chosen for their ability to suggest something beyond the surface, something held in memory.
The hand appears throughout the series. Sometimes it is clearly visible, sometimes it is only implied. The presence of the hand is a way to speak about gesture, touch, and absence without using direct narrative. I also incorporate letterforms and symbols, often derived from theological or philosophical texts, but I alter them so they cannot be read. Their role is to exist visually, to carry weight without delivering a message.
Through the repetition of printing, layering, and refinement, these pieces developed a rhythm that mirrored my own internal process. Working this way became a kind of meditation. Each decision in the studio—each print, each piece of leaf, each adjustment in tone—was part of that ongoing search for what silence actually holds. These works are made from that search. They are records of attention, memory, and the presence that remains after words fall away.
1108 emerges from a process of layering touch, impression, and reflective surface. The palladium and intaglio base creates a deep tonal field, into which metal leaf is delicately integrated. The result is a quiet image that holds the gesture of the hand as both artifact and apparition. Like others in the Hands Series, this work contemplates the absence embedded in presence and the ritual of making as a form of remembering.
1106 reflects a tension between gesture and surface. The metal leaf enhances the tonal complexity of the palladium base, allowing the hand’s impression to emerge subtly through layers of process. It is less an image than an event—a trace suspended in time, contemplating the dualities of presence and erasure.
1064 invites contemplation of the surface as a reflective field. The gesture of the hand is etched not only in metal but in memory. Palladium's deep tonal capacity is brought into resonance with the luminosity of leaf, forming an artifact that is both physical and spectral. This print speaks to the repetition of care and the persistence of form.
1075 offers a restrained visual field where touch is not announced but intuited. It speaks in quiet surfaces—palladium’s glow emerging from under leaf and ink. This piece captures the tension between gesture and stillness, permanence and the fading trace, grounding presence in the act of imprint.
1032 is a reflection on absence made visible. The materials—palladium, ink, metal leaf—are treated as surfaces of memory. The hand is not rendered with clarity but felt in the accumulation of form. Each edge, shadow, and gleam becomes a fragment of a larger, unseen gesture.
