Yoru to Yoru wo Tsunagu (Connecting Night and Night)

The title — connecting night and night — frames a subject of continuity rather than of any single nocturne, the bridge between one darkness and the next. The 2013 print belongs to Ogawa's loose grouping of night scenes from this period and would have been pulled, like the rest of her practice, from a single etched plate inked with viscosities of varying stiffness so that dark grounds and the small bright incidents that punctuate them are carried in one press run. The single-plate viscosity method is well matched to nocturnal subjects: the deep aquatint beds that hold the night can be wiped to varying plate tones while a stiff roll of contrasting ink lays brighter color over isolated passages without disturbing the dark field. Made the same year as Meguru Tsuki and Sono Mukou, the print sits within Ogawa's mid-career meditation on light at low intensities — small everyday observations of how one night turns into another — translated into the layered chromatic weave that has been her signature vocabulary.