Installation - The Matsuo Plastic Light Show Happy Bars
"The Matsuo Happy Bars Plastic Light Show" stands as the most visceral externalization of a liminal experience that set the artist's trajectory in motion. Faced with a brush with death, the work maps the boundary of the intangible through a dreamlike cartography populated by visions and nightmares. From that point on, this experience became a source of strength, energy, and self-reflection, shaping Matsuo's sense of self and profoundly influencing his work as an extension of himself throughout his artistic journey, up to the present day.
At seventeen, an overdose left him in a deep coma: a trance in which visions, dreams, and nightmares unfolded across a dilated sense of time. That descent into the unconscious became the vector that shaped his artistic language and identity. Today, Matsuo reframes this founding experience as a generative force: driven by a constant restlessness and a refusal of rigid labels, the artist turns this brush with the limit into a vital affirmation of connection with others.
The artist's visual vocabulary derives directly from the imagery conceived within his coma. Symbols such as eyes, tears, and vertical lines are not casual compositions but residues of the experience that marked his rebirth. One of the most formative visions placed him in a position of abyssal observation: enclosed beneath a manhole grate, Matsuo watched his own stillness and his family's premature mourning, submerged in an emotional storm. In that half-light, impulses toward life and toward dissolution contended for his consciousness, while he searched, in vain, for a single gleam to guide him through the dark vastness. From that point on, his work constitutes the material formalization of this search for the luminous amid darkness.
After a succession of visions, his return to consciousness took place in a hospital bed, under the weight of crossed glances that condensed affection, anguish, and relief. This revelatory experience turned the figure of the eye into a cornerstone of his visual repertoire. The light that had been absent at the moment of collapse is precisely the element Matsuo inserts into his work, enacting a gesture of restitution that seeks to illuminate the viewer's path through their own moments of darkness.