Lake Towada

The things we experience in real life are always fluid and fragmental, often leaving a small sense of sorrow. Adding a colour, or drawing a line; I believe that a painting created through the repetition of such simple actions, manifests as a strong, robust and independent material, existing as a large body of time. The motifs that come to the surface while painting sometimes have a stronger meaning than the thing in real life; this is frightening to me, and precious at the same time.

Matsuoka’s competence in pulling together Matisse-esque motifs (such as women and fish bowls) and her depiction of manga-like facial expressions (she says Shigeyuki Fukumitsu’s earliest anthology is the best) with a rough texture is impressive. Her use of curved lines, or non-straight lines, must not be dismissed. By giving uneven lines to motifs that naturally would have straight lines, the canvas is flooded with the energy of lines (without being too conspicuous). The gracefulness with which she conceals the difficulty of pulling this together into one screen is also a feature of Matsuoka’s work.

（Public／Selection Committee Kenjiro Hosaka）