Ratio XVII

Ratio XVII belongs to Nakazawa's ongoing numbered series in which proportion and geometric relationship function as the primary subject. The title points to a composition organized around mathematical division — likely a field of rectangular or planar elements whose dimensions echo classical ratios such as the golden section or simple integer intervals. Nakazawa's serial prints typically isolate a small set of formal elements against an evenly worked ground, directing attention to surface, edge, and the spacing between forms. Although his signature practice combines copperplate etching with gold, silver, and platinum leaf, a mokuhanga register adapts comparable concerns to wood and water-based pigment: flat saturated fields, the quiet vibration of overlapping translucent layers, and a careful density of the printed plane. Within the Ratio sequence, individual works read less as discrete images than as iterations on a shared formal problem. The print situates Nakazawa in the lineage of postwar Japanese printmakers — among them Onchi Kōshirō and Yoshida Hodaka — who pushed the medium toward austere abstraction while preserving the material tact of the woodblock tradition.