Mon histoire, son histoire

The title's pairing of first- and third-person possessives ("My story, his/her story") implies a reflective, autobiographical subject, very likely framed around Yuriko, who has modelled for Watanabe across his entire mature career and is the subject of much of his nude work. Mezzotint gives such introspective titling a fitting visual register: image and ground share the same physical substance — the burr raised by the rocker — with the figure brought forward only by partial removal of that burr through scraping. There is no contour line; everything is tone, and figure and field are continuous matter differentiated by depth of bite alone. Such metaphysical equivalence between body and surrounding space has been remarked on in Watanabe's work since his earliest critical reception in France in the 1980s. The print continues his long-running treatment of the nude not as erotic spectacle but as a vehicle for slow, technically exacting reflection on intimacy, duration, and shared biography.