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if you, like me, have been gripped with off-the-charts ennui lately, a trip to Poster House in the Chelsea/Flatiron District will (usually) cure whatever ails you. Or at least give you something unexpected to commune with.

During today’s visit, I was drawn to this group of four posters in the just-opened exhibition Fallout: Atoms for War & Peace. This series of corporate propaganda posters for the aerospace and defense company General Dynamics was designed by Erik Nitsche in the late 1950s—each poster represents a potential application of atomic energy. In particular, I couldn’t take my eyes off the piece in the upper right-hand corner, titled “Worlds Without End.”

From the exhibition description: Technology from General Dynamics’s Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program was used during the Space Race as part of numerous NASA launch systems. In this humbling design, a minuscule Atlas rocket skirts by a black hole and several galaxies, underscoring the infinite promise of space exploration—truly “worlds without end.”

What grabbed me about this piece was the intense blackness of the black hole. It reminded me of Vantablack, a shade of black so dark, it disappears details and makes objects look like two-dimensional cut-outs due to its nonreflective quality. Whenever I seek out images of Vantablack, my stomach does a little flip—I feel that I am looking at something that I am not supposed to see. It is so unnaturally dark, swallowing light like a rip in reality.

From the exhibition copy: To achieve the intense depth of black in the composition, Nitsche instructed his printer to pass each poster through the press multiple times.

I wished this poster were displayed at eye-level so that I could stare into it a bit longer.