PARIS.- Covering sixty years of the career of Takesada Matsutani (1937, Osaka, Japan), this exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is the first major retrospective in France of this Japanese artist who has been living and working in Paris since 1966. The exhibition is built around an exceptional donation of 22 works made by Matsutani to the National Museum of Modern Art, which range from the late 1950s to the present. The exhibition, thus, also retraces Matsutani’s career all the way back to its origins; mixing the late 1950s work of traditional nihonga style and surrealistic pieces inspired by informal abstraction, which evolved into his Gutai artworks of the early 1960s.

This richly original artist’s fascination with organic material and propagation, begun in his Gutai period, and the artist’s ties with time and space marked by a Buddhist culture, moved in the 1970s to an experimentation with “hard edge” accents before taking on a very personal “black” creation.

In 1963, at the age of 26, Matsutani was accepted by Gutai’s founder, Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972) into the group (the name, Gutai, in Japanese evokes the concrete rapport between artist and material). Yoshihara was convinced of the originality of the artist’s abstract paintings; his invention of surfaces covered with gaping blister-like forms of vinyl adhesive glue. French critic Michel Tapié, who travelled in Japan to promote Art informel in the late 1950s, also saluted the entry of Matsutani into Gutai. It was thus that a dialogue began with organic matter, the foundation block of his work to come and which he entitled Propagation in the 1960s. Perhaps because in his adolescence he suffered from tuberculosis, he discovered cells, observed under microscope, reinforcing his interest in the living and growing, a fascination that developed along with that for the abstract works of Kandinsky.

Thanks to a first prize won in 1966 (Franco-Japan competition) he received a grant from the French government for an extended visit to France, eventually taking up permanent residence in Paris. From 1967 to 1971 he devoted himself to engraving at Stanley William Hayter’s experimental Atelier 17 where he became an assistant. He discovered silkscreen printing, which led him to a new style approaching “hard edge”. But, for him, notions of propagation as well as the development of three-dimensional forms always overrode any real influence of American artistic movements.

Marked by Shinto and Buddhism since childhood and pursued in France by diverse reading, his spiritual and philosophical notions of the two religions pushed him to a personal artistic style, mixing his media using organic matter with the concepts of space and time.

In 1977 he started the Streams series (also known as Currents) concentrating on the use of paper, graphite and sumi ink. These works, made on 10-metre-long rolls of paper, show visually, both the artist’s patient gesture—covering the surface in diligent, timeconsuming, mark-making in graphite—and the final action of Matsutani diluting the graphite with the flow of solvent. Soon returning to his favourite medium of vinyl adhesive, he incorporated it into his Streams to create swollen surfaces on canvas or paper.

He expanded his development of works in situ. Over time, installations are increasingly more monumental and ambitious, often activated with a live performance by the artist himself (i.e. by puncturing a canvas sac full of ink and letting it flow on a stone or canvas below). In 2015 color returned to the artist’s work playing an important role with unusually large-scale works such as the lively colored tondos: yellows, blues and greens which end the exhibition. One of the rare Japanese artists to have spent most of his career in France, Matsutani is honored with this exhibition exploring the breadth of his career, one of constant experimentation and exploration, using organic materials to lead towards the spiritual through devoted self-reflection.