Tromb

"Tromb" — likely a French rendering of "trombe" (waterspout, vortex) — pictures a swirling vertical form rising from the copper plate's deep, rocked ground. Watanabe builds his blacks by working a serrated rocker across the entire plate before scraping and burnishing back areas of light, and in this 2001 abstract that process is laid bare: the central spiral of luminous greys reads as turbulence captured in tonal gradation rather than line. The composition reduces to a single dynamic event, with the velvety mezzotint surround functioning less as background than as the medium from which the form is excavated. Tromb belongs to a quieter strand of Watanabe's work, alongside Croissant and Arche, where the figure recedes and the act of scraping itself becomes the subject. It demonstrates the technical control he had developed two decades after leaving the École des Beaux-Arts in Tokyo, and a sensitivity to atmospheric phenomena that would reappear in his later water and shoreline plates.