Absence Makes These Images Grow Fuller

Japanese printmaker Ryoji Ikeda’s first solo show in the U.S., at Gallery Soolip, is a modest but stunning affair. Ikeda’s rich, dark monochrome prints combine images with text, though both are at least partially obscured, rendering them more suggestive than descriptive.

Dense shadow encroaches on the gates, doorways and interiors in several of the photo etchings and aquatints. The architectural fragments appear twice in each print, mirrored, side by side, but repetition reinforces the mystery of these spaces more than it clarifies their context. The interiors appear not just empty but abandoned, industrial rather than domestic, stark but laden with associations of loss.

Beneath most of the images appears a block or two of text, written in a tight, regular hand in even rows, then reversed, rendering it almost entirely illegible. The passages derive from various sources, transcribed in English, French and German, but their actual meaning becomes immaterial as the strokes themselves assume a material--rather than merely denotational--presence.

The inked words sit atop the matte surface of the paper like the lines in Robert Irwin’s monochrome paintings of the 1960s, shifting the focus from specific meaning to how meaning itself is encoded and perceived. Ikeda’s prints resonate, paradoxically, with absence, their deeply beautiful surfaces epitomizing just how full and complex absence can be.

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* Gallery Soolip, 550 Norwich Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 360-0154, through Feb.21.