Lake Superior, Eagle River

Photograph: © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery

Modesty mingles with elegant pomp in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s display of 14 very big black-and-white photographic seascapes. Many of the works here were shown as smaller prints at Sonnabend Gallery in 1997, but size matters at Gagosian, so like other newcomers to this blockbuster mill, Sugimoto has ramped up his production for his first show with the gallery.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These images are seriously sumptuous, awash in atmospherics and incremental optics, all lovingly shot with long exposures and a consistent horizon line. Seven daytime views, hung in a row, progress from foggy obscurity in Bay of Sagami, Atami (1998) to bisected clarity in Sea of Japan, Rebun Island (1996). But the real excitement is in the velvety darkness of the back gallery, where seven nighttime seascapes recall Ad Reinhardt’s eye-calibrating black paintings. Look long enough, and inky nothingness gives way to a dim sliver of faraway light or a rippled current in the foreground.

That’s about as much detail as you’ll get in these calm, subtle photographs, which have no boats, no sun, no moon, no stars—not even waves. You don’t need the biblical nudge in the show’s title to intuit that Sugimoto sought out vistas that were equally antediluvian and contemporary, the most extreme example of his ongoing enterprise of depicting time and timelessness. While these images aren’t as studiously entertaining as some of his other subjects—Madame Tussauds wax sculptures, movie theaters—they are certainly more elemental.