From the 1970s onward, Domoto further developed his geometric vocabulary of rectangles and circles, producing works with titles such as Planet, Sun, Eclipse, and Meteor, all of which evoke the cosmos. These investigations also intersected with his Chain Reaction series, in which circles expand outward like ripples, eventually leading to works such as The Universe.
In Solutions de continuités – Constellation 1, the picture plane was structured through the repetition of small circles. In later works, however, Domoto explored the idea that a circle can become a point when reduced in scale and a plane when enlarged, filling square canvases with circles and triangles that generate increasingly complex spatial relationships.
In the catalogue for Hisao Domoto: Thirty Years, held at the Seibu Museum of Art in 1987, Toru Takemitsu referred to Sengai’s Zen painting Circle, Triangle, Square (○△□). Although the work has been interpreted in various ways, it is often understood as a representation of the universe through simple geometric forms. Taisetsu D. T. Suzuki, in his own interpretation, translated its title as The Universe.
A similar sense of cosmology may be found in Domoto’s The Universe, which also reflects the artist’s naturalistic sensibility rooted in his background in Nihonga painting. Within the green ripples animated by splashes and drips, white circles and triangles appear and disappear, while the repeating wave patterns seem to extend beyond the edges of the canvas, suggesting an infinite expanse. Furthermore, the multilayered pictorial space that Domoto had explored in series such as Solutions de continuités and Critical Point finds a new expression here, expanding toward a sense of infinity that resonates with the cosmos itself.