Takesada Matsutani’s globular, blob-like compositions stem from an unlikely source: blood, which he viewed under a microscope in the 1960s with a friend at medical school. The Osaka-born, Paris-based artist sought to recreate what he saw, armed with industrial glue polyvinyl acetate and a heady dose of imagination.
From the early 1960s until the 1970s Matsutani was a key member of the Gutai Art Association, the first radical, post-war artistic collective in Japan. The group spurned the traditional art approaches of the time in favour of performative immediacy, interactive environments and a new wave of experimental art. As the group’s manifesto stated, ‘Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life.’
Matsutani went on to develop his own mode of lifelike material by pouring vinyl adhesive glue, inflating it with his own breath and slicing it and watching it cave in on itself as he dried it with a fan. The resulting forms were peculiar, disconcertingly bodily and went on to form the basis of his distinctive visual language.
The artist’s six-decade career is spotlighted in an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, the artist’s first solo show in Hong Kong. Organised with art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément, the show spans the breadth of the artist’s practice, from works on paper created during a period of frugality in 1970s Paris to recent paintings conceived during quarantine and a seminal site-specific installation from the artist’s archive.
Some works resemble deflated balloons, such as Puffed up-1 and Puffed up-2 (both 2020); others are reminiscent of ruptured egg yolks, as seen in Circle-Yellow A.M. (2019).
In recent years, Matsutani’s practice has evolved with more emphasis on the meditative and methodical, though he remains in tune with the values of his past: simplicity, pure gesture and raw material.
The artist manages repulsion, allure and elegance in a single form. In his multifaceted, fluid approach, he seeks to stop time, materialise a suspended moment and harness philosophy’s call for a ‘return to the simplicity of everyday experience’. In Matsutani’s work, mind, body, matter and spirit converge. §
