Print 37-1 (Hundred Layers of Color)

Print 37-1 continues Kouseki Ono's Hundred Layers of Color project, in which a single diamond-marked silkscreen is overprinted on washi sixty to one hundred times, each pass carrying a different ink color. The 37-1 designation marks it as the first palette state of composition 37, placing it in the central stretch of Ono's numbered sequence where the artist had already established his core method and was working through systematic palette permutations. The overall image is non-figurative: a uniform field of stacked diamond columns, with surface relief of roughly five to six millimetres above the paper. Color reads not as a single chosen hue but as the integral of every layer beneath the topmost, so that small shifts in the order of pulls produce visibly different optical results across otherwise identical compositions. Born in 1979 in Kurashiki and trained at Tokyo Zokei and Tokyo Geidai, Ono uses these 1-state prints as the canonical reading of each numbered composition, against which any subsequent variants are compared.