KOMAI Tetsuro was the “poet of copperplate engraving” who shouldered almost single-handedly the postwar revival and artistic deepening of intaglio printmaking in Japan. Rekindling, in postwar Japan, the flame of tradition that HASEGAWA Kiyoshi had preserved in Paris, Komai ignited it with a distinctly modern sensibility, ushering in what could truly be called an age of copperplate printmaking in the Japanese art world.

Indispensable to any discussion of Komai’s work are the tremor of line and the abyss of white space. Within the etching process—an extraordinarily delicate yet inherently violent act of scratching a copper plate with a needle and corroding it with acid—he fixed fragments of the human unconscious and traces of dreams. As seen in his representative work Ephemeral Phantasm, a single line drawn on the plate is never merely a contour describing an object. It is the vibration of Komai’s own nerves, imbued with a precarious beauty that seems to wander along the boundary between reality and non-reality. His blacks, moreover, carry an undertone of urban solitude, postwar nihilism, and a distinctly surrealist sense of the fantastic.

Technically, Komai freely combined etching, aquatint, drypoint, and other methods, exploiting to the fullest the inherent indirectness of printmaking. He once remarked that “printmaking is a struggle between my intention and the material of the copper plate, and from that dialogue images emerge that even I could not have anticipated.” This trust in what lies beyond intention lends his works a profound spiritual depth and a richly layered allure—one that never exhausts the viewer, no matter how long it is contemplated.