YOKO MATSUMOTO: DARKNESS AGAINST NATURE
White Cube present the artist Yoko Matsumoto’s exhibition, which brings together works from the 1980s to the present day. ‘Darkness Against Nature’ takes its title from the earliest work included in the exhibition; painted in 1980, the artwork exemplifies the artist’s conceptual concerns, which stem from the agency of colour and the fluidity of paint.
June 28 - August 3, 2024
Committed to the notion of ‘painting with colour and form alone’, Matsumoto creates immersive compositions in a reduced palette that articulate the primacy of painterly expression. The turbulent surface of Darkness Against Nature eschews representation, and is instead wrought by dynamic, flowing movement. In it, the upper portion of the canvas is dominated by a dark vortex-like form, surrounded by washes of blues, purples, pinks, greys and whites.
In this exhibition, the artist returns to the city that played such a pivotal role in the development of this process and instigated her desire to create paintings that ‘no one had ever seen before’. Matsumoto studied oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in the 1950s, where she grappled with the constraints of the medium, wanting to wield her brush ‘freely and paint without restraint’.
Working on the floor with speed, to respond to the vagaries of the fast-drying paint, Matsumoto applies thinned layers to the canvas, before wiping the pigment away with a cloth and repeating the process. The variances in pressure result in a diffusion of colour and light, and connect her with the now-established genre of ‘hazy painting’.
In the early 2000s Matsumoto returned to the medium that had so troubled her in her early career: oil painting. As she later noted, ‘Though its smell and its stickiness had driven me away long ago, after more than thirty years I came full circle’. This also marked a transition from the use of pink to green, a colour that the artist described as a ‘problematic’ for its inevitable associations with mountains or grassland.
In Thought Circuit III (2006), the jagged and opaque physicality of oil paint predominates, signalling a departure from the soft haziness characterising the artist’s earlier works. Instead, a dense network of dark charcoal, green, orange and white marks suggest routes and pathways which, as the title infers, have to do with cognitive process as much as any natural phenomena.
The exhibition includes two new watercolours created by the artist this year. As with her acrylic works, Matsumoto uses pigment to create overlapping layers; however, here the paint holds its edges, dictated by the rivulets of water that carry it. Strata form on the page – a constellation of nebulous forms and fluid gestures that contrast the dissipation of colour in her works on canvas.