Matsumoto studied oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in the 1950s under the tutelage of Ryōhei Koiso (1903–88), who encouraged her to shift her focus away from the European Modernists, such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, in favour of abstract painting. In 1956, she visited the ‘Exposition Internationale de l’Art Actuel’, a major travelling exhibition that introduced burgeoning Western movements to Japanese audiences. Invigorated by the improvisatory methodology of Art Informel, Matsumoto began making paintings based ‘purely on colour and shape’ guided by her realisation that ‘abstract painting was about colour itself, that colour was everything […] colour determined form, and form obeyed colour’ – a philosophy that would come to define her practice thereafter.
After graduating in 1960, Matsumoto continued working with oils, creating abstract paintings with scumbled sections of red, blue, black and white. However, she soon grew frustrated with the medium’s constraints, lamenting her inability to wield her brush ‘freely and paint without restraint’. In 1967, Matsumoto accompanied her husband, art critic Teruo Fujieda, to embark on a year-long trip, 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, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. There, she also discovered materials that were unavailable in Japan at the time: Liquitex acrylic paint, gloss-polymer medium and unprimed, raw cotton canvas. Over the next decade, she experimented with pigment and gloss medium, refining a technique that combined the receptiveness of oil paint with the immediacy of acrylic: ‘I thought I could turn my resistance to oil painting into something positive and create interesting expressions’. Her goal was ‘to express a space with transparency like an original ink painting’, one of ‘fuzzy and indistinct things. An ideal space.’
Working on the floor and with speed to account for the fast-drying paint, Matsumoto applies layers of acrylic dissolved thinly in water and then gloss-polymer medium to make the surface robust and radiant on to a gessoed canvas, before wiping the pigment and medium away with a cloth and continuously repeating the process. The variances in pressure result in a diffusion of colour and areas of softly mutating light and shadow. This physically demanding technique, in which the articulation of paint is wholly dependent on the artist’s body, established what is now known as her signature genre of ‘hazy painting’. In gradually developing this methodology, Matsumoto sought to emulate the transparency of suiboku-ga – traditional monochrome ink wash painting – with non-traditional materials, while striving to ‘make pictures the likes of which no one had seen before’. Working without underdrawings or preliminary studies, she allowed herself to be guided by the materiality and temperament of the paint, external conditions such as weather and humidity, the contingencies of her process and the movements of her own body.
From 1970 onwards, the use of pink became a defining element of Matsumoto’s hazy paintings – a colour that she believes was ‘promised to [her] since [she] was in [her] mother’s womb’. For the artist, pink bears no specific concept, but rather exists in the ‘innermost depths of our subconscious’, a hue that ‘lies beneath inexpressible thought’. In 1978, she held a solo exhibition at Koh Gallery in Tokyo, featuring the work Chaos (1978), which she considered to be one of her earliest successes with the colour. A central passage of vivid pink is encircled by cloud-like swathes of brown, blue, purple and white. While firmly rooted in abstraction, there are remnants of the figurative in the concentrated fuchsia form, recalling a human body, violently trapped in swirling mists. Field of Midian (1983), by contrast, eschews traditional representation altogether. Here, a plethora of frenetic red-pink brushstrokes seem to vibrate across the surface in an undulating veil of tonalities.
Pink remained a consistent factor of Matsumoto’s practice for over three decades, but from the late 1990s and early 2000s, she also entrusted her canvas to other hues and contours. She first turned to black: ‘for isn’t an artist’s understanding and handling of, and technical fluency with black and white one of the most important issues in contemporary art?’ However, the black Matsumoto used was not one from a tube but instead one that she mixed herself, from a combination of burnt umber, ultramarine deep and charcoal. As a result, in these paintings, black reveals itself not as a flat pigment but rather appears to exist as a spectre beneath the surface, from where it commands and shapes infinitesimal nuances of surrounding tones.
Matsumoto’s relinquishing of pink coincided with a development that she described as ‘self-contradictory’. In the early 2000s, she was unexpectedly drawn back to the medium that she ‘so hated’: oil paint. When Matsumoto resumed painting with oils, she transformed her process entirely. Alongside a sudden realisation that she had exhausted the possibilities of acrylics, the physical demands of her working method had taken its toll: ‘my body screamed louder and louder, and I thought, yes, I could stand up and paint on canvas again. So, I decided to face oil painting again for the first time in decades’. At this juncture, she embraced green as her primary colour, inspired by an earlier encounter with Paul Cézanne’s The Great Pine (1889). Of this painting, she remarked in 2009: ‘The diverse range of green is beautiful […] I felt a divine revelation from this picture. That’s when I became utterly confident that I could paint a green painting.’ While Cézanne employed green to depict natural elements, Matsumoto sought instead to create ‘autonomous green paintings’, which were not bound by such representations of reality.
Employing vivid, artificial pigments such as viridian and cadmium green in an effort to evade the rich connotations of more natural tones, she nonetheless titled one of her earliest experiments Private Landscape (2005), acknowledging the ‘problematic’ nature of green with its inevitable associations, as well as her own ‘private’ aspirations in dedicating herself to the colour. Rather than employing green as a primary colour field, she layers it in undulating strokes over black, orange and scarlet. In Thought Circuit III (2006), she shifts to lighter green shades, intersecting ragged, perpendicular threads of green with eruptions of white. The dense network of charcoal, green, orange and white offers a plethora of routes and pathways, which, as the title suggests, evoke cognitive processes as much as they mirror any natural phenomena.
Matsumoto begins each of her compositions without preconceived concepts or sketches: ‘creation always comes unexpectedly out of nothing. I start from nothing – ‘無’ in Japanese, with a completely empty mind. Then, by chance, wonderful fields of colour and brushstrokes appear.’ This meditative approach yields canvases replete with independent, fluid gestures that seem to fundamentally evidence the direct, communicative nature of paint. Entirely intuitive, her paintings realise a spatiotemporal realm in which self, material and colour coexist, driven by her constant pursuit of ‘the accidental, miraculous formations that arise within chaos and order.’
Yoko Matsumoto was born in Tokyo in 1936, where she continues to live and work. She studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1960. Matsumoto has exhibited in major solo and two-person exhibitions, most notably The National Art Center, Tokyo (2009); The National Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Japan (2005); Goethe Institute, Düsseldorf, Germany, and The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (both 1991). Her work has appeared in numerous museum collections and group exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2023); The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (2023); The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan (2022); Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan (2020); The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan (2011); Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan (1994–1995) and Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan (1986), among others.
