I found the show to be very revealing and was also delighted to see other works such as paintings and sculptures in there. It was a treat to see the Red Interior from Dusseldorf with its amazing spatial qualities: the interior floor, wall and exterior patio all perfectly described and spatially palpable, yet all rendered with exactly the same red and zig-zag black.
I don't see the cut outs as a culmination of his life's work or in fact as a single unit of achievement . There are may different purposes for them - from the page turning tactility of Jazz , appliqué fabric designs , posters and book covers, the stained glass windows to the heroism in the dazzling grand murals with their white to blue anchoring of colours and larger than life scale. Each reason for a cut out has a different feel to it and a thorough understanding of its purpose. They are not simply a one size fits all approach. "Mimosa" is possibly the closest one gets to an easel painting with its densely interlocked, layering of colour to colour. (By all accounts a draining one to make too). The blue nudes are hewn. In many of the works , the use of white is akin to light seen rolling over forms or bursting out at you from behind figures which dissolve at their contours or - at times - sneaking in and out of the terrain of the landscape. Curves and sinewy amorphous shapes can be read as analogous to specifics such as watery reflections and refractions but are so much more than that. They function as space makers and feel close in character to the lines in his drawings - which have an equally rangy and springy plasticity. The phrasing always goes on further than you think - without ever losing impetus. The word 'decorative' somehow saps the vitality out of his achievements.
I am not convinced of the story of him not having the strength to paint any more either . Many of these works take massive concentration and a heavy pair of scissors weighs more than a paintbrush to be banal about the physical demands. It is worth pondering what he means by painting? For one thing many of his most ambitious works through the forties were modest in size. In fact he mentions wanting to really get to grips with painting and many of the subsequent works were made with canvases propped up on a small bed side table. No, when he says painting, I think he is alluding to mural painting, (or rather painting frescoes as he himself said he would like to spend an afterlife doing, if there was such a thing). I would venture that much of the ambition in the cut outs is to find an answer to Pollock and other large American mural scaled works of the late 40s and early 50s. He was acutely aware of them, through his son Pierre and also discussed them with Picasso (who was Eurocentric and ambivalent to them). The leaf shapes with their curving repeating rhythms create astonishing orchestrations of colour in, and colour made, space. They have a breathtaking clarity and directness - Matisse is a guff free zone! These large works were his riposte to North American modernism. Its as if he dabbed on a little cologne, adjusted his silk tie, picked up a bat and smacked the ball back as hard as he could... clear to the pacific ocean!
Emyr Williams - April 21 2014