Ailes

Ailes ("Wings") belongs to the body of natural subjects Watanabe began incorporating from the early 2000s, alongside butterflies, birds, frogs, and shoreline forms. The mezzotint depicts a wing or pair of wings — likely lepidopteran given the artist's recurring interest in butterflies and moths — rendered as a fan of pale tones scraped from the plate's deep black ground. Mezzotint suits this subject for its capacity to register the gradations of pigment and venation across a wing's surface as continuous tone rather than line; Watanabe builds the form by burnishing fine highlights into the rocked field rather than by drawing edges. The print reflects the gradual broadening of his vocabulary away from the female nude that had dominated his earlier decades, into a quieter observational register in which a single natural element fills the plate. Like much of his nature-based work, it is typically printed in muted single colour or in plain black, the tone selected to suit the softness of the subject.