Print 12-2 (Hundred Layers of Color)

Print 12-2 is part of Ono Kouseki's Hundred Layers of Color, the open-ended body of work for which his extreme-overprinting silkscreen process was first developed. A single fine-mesh screen pierced with tiny diamond-shaped marks is pulled over the sheet sixty to one hundred times, each pass loaded with a different ink, until the accumulated pigment stands roughly five to six millimetres above the paper as a forest of small coloured columns. Unlike the Nami-e prints, the Hundred Layers sheets carry no representational image: the subject is the layering itself, and the work is read as a chromatic core sample. The 12-2 designation indicates a second variant within the twelfth state of the screen, typical of Ono's habit of producing closely related siblings in which only the colour order differs. Viewed frontally the sheet resolves into a single complex hue; viewed at an angle the columns shadow each other, exposing the buried under-layers and the temporal sequence of the printing.