Committed to the notion of ‘painting with colour and form alone’, Matsumoto creates immersive compositions in a reduced palette that articulate the primacy of painterly expression. The turbulent surface of Darkness Against Nature eschews representation, and is instead wrought by dynamic, flowing movement. In it, the upper portion of the canvas is dominated by a dark vortex-like form, surrounded by washes of blues, purples, pinks, greys and whites. Exuding presence, the composition appears to manifest two opposing forces, caught in a chaotic symbiosis or attempting to subsume one another. As the title implies, the work speaks to the immaterial and intangible attributes of nature – light, air, mist, cloud and the endless mutations of shadow – but also the inscrutable depths of interiority.

In this exhibition, the artist returns to the city that played such a pivotal role in the development of this process and instigated her desire to create paintings that ‘no one had ever seen before’. Matsumoto studied oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in the 1950s, where she grappled with the constraints of the medium, wanting to wield her brush ‘freely and paint without restraint’. In 1967 she accompanied her husband, art critic Teruo Fujieda, first to Cleveland and then to New York, where she encountered works by the Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. There, she also discovered materials unavailable in Japan at the time, such as acrylic paint and unprimed, raw cotton canvas. The experience proved to be formative for the artist, and over the following years she developed a technique that combined the receptiveness of oil paint with the immediacy of acrylic, drawing upon both the lightness of Frankenthaler’s surfaces and the Japanese ink drawing practice of suiboku-ga.

In Matsumoto’s expressive and yet exacting abstraction, colour is a unifying force that determines form. She works without underdrawings or preliminary studies, guided by her materials, the impact of external conditions such as weather and humidity, chance and her own physical movement. Working on the floor with speed, to respond to the vagaries of the fast-drying paint, Matsumoto applies thinned layers to the canvas, before wiping the pigment away with a cloth and repeating the process. The variances in pressure result in a diffusion of colour and light, and connect her with the now-established genre of ‘hazy painting’. 

From 1970 onwards, the use of pink became a defining element of her paintings, characterising the majority of her output for three decades. In Field of Midian (1983), swathes of vivid pink intermingle with tones of grey, blue and purple. The surface appears to vibrate, evoking licking flames or violent winds gushing through a landscape. In The Mountains of Ephraim III (1990), deep pinks and purples emerge through undulating, cloud-like masses of more muted tones. For the artist, pink carries with it no particular concept, but rather exists in the ‘innermost depths of our subconscious’, a hue that ‘lies beneath inexpressible thought’.

In the early 2000s Matsumoto returned to the medium that had so troubled her in her early career: oil painting. As she later noted, ‘Though its smell and its stickiness had driven me away long ago, after more than thirty years I came full circle’. This also marked a transition from the use of pink to green, a colour that the artist described as a ‘problematic’ for its inevitable associations with mountains or grassland. Following a desire to create ‘autonomous green paintings’ purely through vivid, saturated pigments, she began to employ viridian and cadmium green. In Thought Circuit III (2006), the jagged and opaque physicality of oil paint predominates, signalling a departure from the soft haziness characterising the artist’s earlier works. Instead, a dense network of dark charcoal, green, orange and white marks suggest routes and pathways which, as the title infers, have to do with cognitive process as much as any natural phenomena.

The exhibition includes two new watercolours created by the artist this year. As with her acrylic works, Matsumoto uses pigment to create overlapping layers; however, here the paint holds its edges, dictated by the rivulets of water that carry it. Strata form on the page – a constellation of nebulous forms and fluid gestures that contrast the dissipation of colour in her works on canvas. Another instance in which she ‘forgets time and space’, these works on paper offer another means through which Matsumoto has engaged physically and psychically with the spatiotemporal realm of painting.