YOKO MATSUMOTO

White Cube Mason’s Yard presents the debut solo exhibition of the Japanese artist Yoko Matsumoto. Featuring artworks from the mid-1980s to the present day, the exhibition introduces Matsumoto’s expressive and disciplined abstraction.

January 18 – March 9, 2024

Throughout her extensive body of work, colour exists as a unifying force that marries tempestuous energies with a mercurial sense of physicality. With a rigorous use of light, shade and hue, Matsumoto addresses colour in a processual and meditative manner, distinguishing material constitution, tonal mutability and layered dimensionality.

With the understanding that ‘colour determined form, and form obeyed colour’, Matsumoto has developed a practice that recognises the agency of colour as both conveyor and collaborator. Through immersive compositions, hues are layered in elaborate complexes across which the eye traces nebulous forms and fluid gestures. The vaporous, feathery and climatological turbulence of her compositions are executed with the intentionality of movement across the canvas, the body assuming primacy of painterly expression.

Informed by lineages of Japanese art, in particular the monochromatic ink drawing practice of suiboku-ga, Matsumoto affiliates the transparency inherent to suiboku-ga with the gradated delicacy of traditional landscape painting. ‘My ideal was to express a space with transparency like an original ink painting’, the artist says, ‘fuzzy and indistinct things. An ideal space.’

Characterised by a reduced palette and chiaroscuro, Matsumoto’s paintings weave tapestries of light and shadow through intense and vivid pigment. In the ground floor gallery, seven early works dating from 1989 to the late 1990s showcase her pursuit of focused colour study through the modulation and variability of acrylic paint.

Without prior calculation or preparatory drawing, Matsumoto’s work is intuited in free-form by physical movement and the body’s approximation of the canvas. The artist’s experimentation with different pressures of the hand and variable densities of pigment during the 1970s led to a wide variety of contours and tonalities within her painting. This is most visible in the now signature ‘pink’ works – or her genre of ‘hazy painting’ – which the artist began in 1970 and continued to develop for three decades. Eschewing the normative connotations of pink – as feminine or fantastical – Matsumoto privileges the spectrum of this shade as a mediator of entropic energy.

Matsumoto concentrates on tones of white applied with a roller. Controlling the space and pressure of the roller’s drag results in a variable torrent of pigment, creating dense striations of white that blur and diffuse as though iridised, delivering a mystified space that both obscures and envelops. Evolving from studies of the sky, these bleary abstractions evoke the spiritual, qualities that the artist likens to an ‘afterlife’.