Takesada Matsutani

Trained at the Kyoto School of Fine Arts, Matsutani was drawn very early to the expressive potential of matter. In 1960 he joined the legendary Gutai group, the revolutionary collective founded by Jirō Yoshihara, which advocated experimentation, freedom of the body and a radical break with aesthetic convention. But already Matsutani stood apart: constrained to prolonged immobility, he developed an introspective, almost meditative practice in which latex becomes breath, tension, skin. He does not splash the canvas as his peers did, he makes it breathe.

His signature medium, vinyl glue applied in thick layers, swells, cracks and pulses: the surface becomes flesh. These bulbous, ambiguous forms, at once sensual and abstract, evoke by turns sex, wound and birth. A carnal, visceral body of work that summons Buddhist impermanence as much as the organic obsessions of post-Surrealist Western art.

In 1966 Matsutani left Japan for Paris, where he settled and began a decisive collaboration with the gallerist Raymond Cordier, then with the gallery of the philosopher Michel Tapié. He soon joined Stanley William Hayter’s printmaking studio, Atelier 17, where he deepened his research into line and into black, no longer as an absence of light but as a concentration of energy.

Matsutani’s work then evolved towards more pared-down, almost liturgical forms. Restraint succeeded swelling. He traces long lines of graphite, black, patient, ritual, often on a white ground or on his own latex imprints. These lines become mantra, vital breath, an affirmation of continuity in repetition.