- Venue
- Hauser & Wirth Gallery
- Location
Large scale paintings which explore the never-ending fascination and interplay between black and white, light and dark, shades of darkness and shadow. The denseness of black draws in like a magnetic field. Painters will do different things with the same elements, and Matsutani manages to maximise a feeling of infinity in his blackness – it’s not just the size, it’s the intensity, and the feeling of a skinned-over surface in the texture.
Earlier coloured works from the 60s have exploded, pustule-like pods of paint and glue, which fascinate, intrigue and disgust. There is such a textured, visceral sense to these paintings, mostly entitled as a numbered Work, mostly reds against whites, that it is difficult not to interpret them as implicitly of the body.
The works of this Japanese artist are new to the UK, and great gestural poems of a lifetime’s intensity.
