Meeting Matsutani
Takesada Matsutani’s graphic The Magic Box is a siren in the window of Hauser & Wirth’s North Gallery, drawing you into the white-box space. The 1988 sculpture consists of a black-painted, wood-board cube from which a swathe of graphite-marked cotton cloth unfurls – a shift from fluid to solid form exploring the tension between the object and the space around it. The piece anchors Takesada Matsutani Shifting Boundaries, an exhibition celebrating the work of the Osaka-born artist, organised by Olivier Renaud-Clément, the reputed private art dealer, exhibition organiser and art adviser, which opens today at the London gallery until 18th April.
Matsutani, now 89, has spent over six decades exploring the transformative potential of materials. He was a key figure of the Gutai art movement, a Japanese avant-garde group formed in 1954 whose radical ideas and approaches anticipated later performance and conceptual art. “It was started by Jiro Yoshihara, who was informed about what was going on in France and Italy, particularly Fluxus," says Renaud-Clément, who has worked with Matsutani for over a decade, collaborating with him on a number of major exhibitions. "The premise was very simple: make it new.”
I meet with Renaud-Clément a day ahead of the opening. He appears wearing black fluffy fur Birkenstocks, sunglasses thrown over his head, and is larger-than-life with an infectious enthusiasm for Matsutani. “After the war, things were difficult in Japan. There was no food or money, but it spawned this energetic movement,” he continues, barely drawing breath. “Matsutani was at first pushed away by Yoshihara but then he discovered vinyl glue and developed a new medium for art. He joined the group in ‘63 and the material is prominent in his work to this day.”
On cue, Matsutani arrives with his wife Kate Van Houten, an American artist and printmaker, whom he met in 1967 while working at the art school and studio Atelier 17 in Paris. There he delved into printmaking and experimented with Hard-edge abstraction, before gradually returning to East Asian aesthetics, the layering of graphite pencil becoming a feature of his output.
Standing in the North Gallery decades later, Matsutani stoops with age, but he and his wife are in high spirits, and light up the room. “We saw it for the first time today,” says Van Houten looking around the exhibition. Matsutani smiles, pointing to the 10-meter-long, graphite-covered scroll from his Stream series, which extends across almost two sides of the gallery. The piece embodies the philosophy of Zen – the infinite repetition of small pencil strokes is an act of contemplation and persistence. “We were here this morning to finish this piece,” he says. Traces of graphite stain the gallery wall testifying to his intervention.
“Look at it – it has such power,” chimes Van Houten, who is clearly her husband’s biggest fan. “It’s landscape, it’s marvellous,” she continues. I agree. It is magnificent. Matsutani adds to his works little by little each day, his approach is steady and meditative. “It takes time but I am free,” he smiles.
Renaud-Clément offers a tour of the gallery. At the front of the space are works spanning different periods of the artist’s oeuvre. “Matsutani was poor in the 70s and had little means to buy materials, which is why he started to work with graphite,” he explains. “These pieces become something of a diary because they are about the passage of time. Everyday he fills the sheet of paper. He keeps working because it is a way to move forward, to find new ways.”
The exhibition reveals the performative aspect of Matsutani’s output. We stand before a piece that began life as part of a performance at the artist’s major 2019 retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris. This involved the live "activation" of his Stream series, in which a cloth-covered bag filled with black sumi ink was suspended above a canvas, with the artist piercing it, allowing the ink to drip over the course of the week. The process showed the flow of time and the interaction between the artist's gesture and the material.
“He saves all of his work, so back at the studio, about two years ago, he started working on the piece again and added the vinyl adhesive,” says Renaud-Clément of the organic blob at the centre of the artwork. Matsutani was initially drawn to the fluidity and plasticity of adhesive as a medium for art – it creates sensuous folds as it is blown by fans or the artist’s own breath on the canvas. Renaud-Clément smiles. “He doesn’t control it – it has a natural way of moving. It becomes what it becomes.”
I suggest the addition of adhesive in this particular piece recalls an egg and the idea of birth. Renaud-Clément nods. “It is very much about the womb, and there are sexual components if you look at it.” He laughs: “There are lots of little spermatozoa moving around.”
The work Abstrait is another piece that has evolved over time. “This was originally a performance piece at La Boverie in Liege, Belgium in 2024, where Matsutani created two circles on the canvas. He finished it up more recently in Paris by adding the purple.”
Flashes of purple, what Van Housen poetically refers to as “liquid text” appear in Matsutani's latest work. To the rear of the gallery are pieces completed by the artist in the last nine months, which feature new elements of the Matsutani's evolving practice. Propagation 25-A (2025), a vinyl adhesive, acrylic and graphite pencil work, is lined by a piece of cord that hangs loosely from one corner of the canvas. “Matsutani is constantly finding new materials and now the cord is appearing everywhere – the umbilical cord,” says Renaud-Clément. Above another smaller artwork is a delicate line drawing on the wall. “He does that very often when he’s bored or when he finds something interesting,” Renaud-Clément explains. It is the wonderful sign-off of an artist who even here, in a space intended to celebrate his success, thinks only to work, to create, to complete…
