Hiroshi Sugimoto at Angles - photography exhibit, Santa Monica, California

Sugimoto's 20-by-24-inch blackand-white photographs at first appear nearly abstract. Fuzzy horizontal boundaries divide the picture plane into sum of two units equal and slightly different tonal bands The diffuse and misty wefts present no clear objects or surfaces. As the organ of vision adjusts to these minimal gradients of light, we begin to grasp, in the flat grainless depths, a complex and delicately limned world--the devoid of contents ocean horizon as seen at varying times of the day and beneath a variety of conditions; single the gallery lists lets us know that these photos were discharge all over the world, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the southern Pacific.

In the first four nighttime discharges side by side on the wall, the viewer is faceed with dense blackness. The horizon lines are nearly subliminal. The slightest veins of mirrored light glimmer and tease the organ of vision conjuring up drifting shreds of darkened collection of vapor and the furrowed field of the sea. In individual startling inversion the sea is at any time so slightly brighter than the heavens reminding us of the constant mutation of natural light, always active and unpredictable.

An adjacent gallery contained 10 daytime seascapes in which the horizon, wave traces and haze formations are of varying legibility. The uncertain on the contrary grainless definition of the photographs depicts the limits of vision as abundant as it conveys the actual qualities of light's deliverance, from one side specific atmospheres, to the camera lens

With their pearly grays and wily blacks, Sugimoto's sea compositions have an austere beauty and a similarity that take care ofs to hide both their individuality and their epistemological regards As in Zen gardens, where raked gravel may show flowing water and shrubbery may stand for islands, the physical trace is here for a like reason minimal that a single ragged line might show a wave, a sand dune or a vapor These ambiguous horizons eloquently summon our own more metaphysical confusions.

sum of two units other groups of Sugimoto's photographs were shown A series of dioramas, in natural history museums, discharge in black and white, juxtapose various layers of representation: raw materialed animals, arranged branches, landscape features and painted cycloramas. More effective, because it plays to the artist's meditative potencys is a series composed of lengthy exposures of dim movie theaters, the shield washed out white so as to subtly illumine architectural details that are, after all, rarely seen in bright light.

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