Croissant

A 2009 mezzotint with colour, Croissant takes its title from the French word for crescent, suggesting a moon form, a curled body, or a sliver of light excised from the plate's saturated black. Watanabe's coloured mezzotints are typically printed with restraint — a single muted hue introduced through inking or chine collé rather than multi-plate registration — so the chromatic note here likely sits as a quiet accent against the dominant tonal field. By 2009 he was nearly four decades into a near-exclusive practice of mezzotint, working from his studio in France, and pieces like Croissant show his vocabulary expanding beyond the female nude that had defined his earlier output. The reduced form aligns with the abstract and natural studies he produced through the 2000s alongside his figurative work, where the rocked ground itself carries much of the image's weight and the subject is reduced to a shape suggested rather than described.