Print 23-1 (Hundred Layers of Color)

Print 23-1 sits within Ono Kouseki's Hundred Layers of Color and is built from the same procedure that has defined the artist's practice since the mid-2000s: a single silkscreen incised with a regular grid of minute diamond-shaped marks is pulled over the sheet sixty to one hundred times, each impression loaded with a different ink, depositing a pigment relief roughly five to six millimetres tall. The 23-1 designation places this print as the first variant from the twenty-third screen state, where Ono characteristically tests how a fresh sequence of inks behaves on the established matrix. The diamond grid reads as a continuous chromatic field at conversational distance and as a tessellation of stacked coloured columns at close range, with the lowest layers visible only along the sides of each column. As with the rest of the series, the print concerns itself less with depiction than with the physical and temporal record of its own making, situating Ono among the contemporary Japanese printmakers most committed to procedure as subject.