A year after publishing her Black Box Playing Cards, the Erotic Print Society commissioned Monica Guevara to produce a set of twelve prints depicting the signs of the zodiac – with her trademark erotic twist. Each plate has a fine printed sepia line background, onto which a cool grey-blue wash (plus a splash of red in the Libra print) has been added by hand. The modelling of the bodies is almost entirely achieved through simple line, with shading reserved for pubic and underarm hair, giving the skin a smooth openness against the density of the naturalistic borders.

The astrological subjects are folded into the compositions as a whole rather than simply added as emblem, collapsing the distance between human and zodiacal reference. A recurring device borrowed from the medieval calendar tradition – tiny background figures threshing, treading grapes, drawing a bow – grounds the naked humans within the agrarian year, lending the eroticism a seasonal, labour-bound logic as well as a decorative one.

This contrast of simply-drawn figures and crowded margin is the suite’s chief formal device. Each sign is enclosed within a thicket of identifying plant and creature life – oak and acorn for Sagittarius, parrot and monkey for Gemini, wheat and lizard for Libra – so that the figures sit at the centre of what might well be read as a page from an illuminated herbal or bestiary.

The couples are androgynous, soft-featured, their intimacy tender and unhurried rather than explicit. They have genitalia, but not over-emphasised, drawn with the same light hand as a leaf-vein or bird feather.

The portfolio was first published in 1996, the limitation page showing the EPS’s idiosyncratic roman numeral MCMLXXXXXVI rather than the standard MCMXCVI. It was a subscription-only release of 500 numbered copies, printed on premium 300gsm Colorplan paper and housed in a black hardback folder. To add value and authenticity, each print was blind-stamped with the Guevara maidenhair fern in the bottom right-hand corner.

The set was reissued seven years later, in 2003, in two sets of six prints – the reprint was on lighter stock, and limited to 250 numbered copies, this time without the embossed maidenhair.

For those who need assistance in identifying the twelve signs of the traditional zodiac, here they are in the same order as the prints:

Aries   The Ram   (21 March–19 April)
Taurus   The Bull   (20 April– 20 May)
Gemini   The Twins   (21 May–21 June)
Cancer   The Crab   (22 June–22 July)
Leo   The Lion   (23 July–22 August)
Virgo   The Virgin   (23 August–22 September)
Libra   The Scales   (23 September–23 October)
Scorpio   The Scorpion   (24 October–21 November)
Sagittarius   The Archer   (22 November–21 December)
Capricorn   The Goat   (22 December–19 January)
Aquarius   The Water Bearer   (20 January–18 February)
Pisces   The Fish   (19 February–20 March)

Many thanks to our friend JB, whose website (in development) is here, for sharing this portfolio with us