[3]: 21 In 1954, his condition stabilized and he was admitted to Osaka Municipal High School of Industrial Arts (Ōsaka Shiritsu Kogei Gakkō) in 1954, where he studied nihonga, traditional Japanese painting.
[3]: 21 In the late 1950s, Matsutani produced a series of paintings that, although remaining figurative, employed a more expressionist style and incorporated abstract elements.
[3]: 21 The artist has said that the source for such works was the anguish he felt during his years of solitude and illness: "I outwardly expressed my inner conflict and attempted to brush aside this heavy burden.
[6]: 21 Matsutani soon would abandon figurative painting altogether and adopt an Art Informel style, citing Jean Fautrier as one important influence.
[7] He developed the materiality of his paintings by using a variety of media, including oils and acrylics, sand and cement, and creating rich, textured surfaces.
[6]: 22 Confronted by the challenge of creating something original enough to impress Yoshihara, Matsutani reflected on the type of artwork he wished to make: "I wanted to do something organic, something three-dimensional.
For his first solo exhibition, Matsutani presented a series of paintings with a contrasting color palette of whites and reds that mimic skin and blood.
French art historian Germaine Viatte commented that "there reigned [in the exhibition] a random violence in the hatching of these incised forms, painted on the inside with a raw red.
"[6]: 25 Sexual references abound in many of Matsutani's paintings from this period, such as Work '65, in which sperm cell-like forms appear to swim towards a white opening in the shape of a vulva.
"[12] Although Matsutani relocated to Paris in 1966, he continued to participate in Gutai exhibitions by sending prints made in France to his fellow artists.
While Germaine Viatte recounts that Matsutani had never thought to leave Japan, he found himself awarded in 1966 a scholarship to study for six months in Paris after having entered a contest organized by the Mainichi Shinbun and the Institut Frano-Japonais of Kyoto.
[10]: 62 Matsutani arrived in Paris without any desire to enroll at either the Sorbonne or the École des Beaux-Arts, and only signed up for obligatory French language courses.
The Propagation print series of 1967 reveals itself as a graphic extension of Matsutani's paintings with glue, presenting a black-and-white universe of cells in transformation.
[10]: 63 In 1970, the artist left Atelier 17 and began working at the silkscreen studio of printmakers Lorna Taylor and Kate Van Houten, who he would later marry.
At the beginning of the decade, the artist lived briefly in New York with his wife, a period during which he was exposed to hard-edge painting that was prevalent in Chelsea galleries of the time.
As each line was drawn by hand, the angle of the light against it would show or hide the traces of the pencil marks and the shades of graphite [...] I promised myself I would keep on drawing until the surface turns black.
The artist's final gesture is to pour white spirit or turpentine onto the band's end, liquifying the graphite and creating an expressive cascade of black that drips down the walls to the ground.
Germaine Viatte notes that in the late 1970s, the artist reached middle age and, logically, "time invited itself into Matsutani's art".
[10]: 64 Toshio Yamanashi importantly adds: "The depth of darkness represents not only the thickness of accumulated pencil lines, but also the sedimentation of time, and the marks the artist makes to confirm he is alive.
"[9]: 195 In parallel to his large-scale Stream installations, Matsutani has never ceased to create paintings with glue, continuously exploring the endless variations that this singular material provides.
He began applying graphite to the forms in glue in the late 1970s, creating shadow-like variations upon the canvas that he related to the ideas about beauty and light shared by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki in his essay In Praise of Shadows.
[13]: 195 While for many years Matsutani's palette remained principally black and white, since 2013 the artist has begun employing exuberant shades of yellow, green and blue.