LA CIENEGA AREA

Japanese artist Shoichi Ida has latched on to a slippery idea in a 1979 portfolio of 11 prints called “Surface Is the Between.” Rather like Joni Mitchell, who looked at all aspects of clouds, love and life in her song “Both Sides Now,” Ida has sliced through appearances. He, too, has come up with illusions, but he has also presented a fresh way of examining the materials and elements of art. A philosopher who notes that we learn how the wind moves by looking at trees, Ida may weigh one thing against another, examine an imprint or simply look at something from both sides.

Take surface: To Ida, it isn’t merely a sheet of paper that holds an image on the front. When he prints on both sides of a sheet, surface is the “between” that melds two objects or views. The image of floorboards printed on the back of one work shows through on the front where he has printed illusionistic images of stones. One piece has wire net sandwiched between white paper and thick black ink; in another, a straight line drawn on transparent paper is folded and examined from both sides.

Visually, these black-and-white works are so quiet that you can hear the hush. They may consist of nothing more than a bleeding cloud of ink or a rambling path on a textured sheet. But conceptually, the prints hold their own as they reveal an artist’s heightened sensitivity. (Herbert Palmer Gallery, 802 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Aug. 31.)