Print 19-1 (Hundred Layers of Color)

Print 19-1 belongs to Ono Kouseki's Hundred Layers of Color, the artist's principal abstract sequence and the original site of his extreme-overprinting silkscreen process. A single screen carrying a regular field of minute diamond-shaped marks is overprinted on the same paper sixty to one hundred times, each impression a different ink, so that the finished sheet is less a printed image than a low-relief of stacked pigment columns five to six millimetres deep. The 19-1 numbering indicates the first variant produced from the nineteenth screen state, a working method in which Ono treats each screen as a chromatic problem to be solved across multiple sheets by reordering the ink sequence. The visual result is a flat field that, on close approach, reveals itself to be three-dimensional — a moiré of micro-columns whose colour shifts with the angle of view. Within contemporary Japanese print practice, the Hundred Layers prints are notable for taking silkscreen, historically valued for its flat even deposit, and pushing it toward the opposite extreme of physical accumulation.