In his Notebooks Yoshida wrote: "In the 1950s, while meditating on what I’d taken inside me, trying to find the origin of my thinking, I came to realise that in order to achieve anything, I first needed to establish who I was. When I understood that the colour black absorbed all the other colours, I realised that what I was searching for existed in this blackness. To understand black was to know myself and to discover within me an infinite number of elements to express. This has always been the starting point of my art, the basis for capturing, contemplating and expressing all things."

This deceptively simple work dates from soon after Yoshida’s arrival in Paris, and bears witness to conversations he enjoyed with his new colleague and mentor, the former Surrealist, Stanley Hayter, who had recently returned from working in America during the war years. In New York, Hayter had taught his experimental printing techniques to young emerging Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Roberto Matta, amongst others. In the early years of his four-decade career in Paris, Yoshida began exploring fresh and innovative ideas that seemed to come from a completely different world to the staid, derivative, post-war Japanese art world from which he had so recently escaped. This fertile pitch-black ground never entirely disappeared from Yoshida’s work, and the single horizontal line bisecting the lower picture plane continued to ornament and haunt Yoshida’s mature canvases.