House In Switzerland

House in Switzerland records, in Hodaka Yoshida's reduced architectural vocabulary, a chalet or alpine dwelling encountered during his European travels. Compositions in this mode typically present the house frontally or in three-quarter view, the pitched roof, gable, and façade abstracted into discrete color planes carved as separate blocks and printed in sequence. The mokuhanga process on washi gives the building's edges the precision of a hard-edge painting while retaining the soft fibrous quality of hand-pulled woodblock printing. Hodaka's Swiss subjects belong to the same line of inquiry as his Italian, Mexican, and Indian architectural prints: vernacular built form treated as a vocabulary of geometric primitives. The work also marks a distinct departure from his father Hiroshi's European prints — the Venice and Swiss landscape sheets of the 1920s — which framed the same continent through atmospheric naturalism. Hodaka instead extracts the architecture and reprints it as a flattened, modernist sign.