Philip Taaffe considers the work of Henri Matisse on the occasion of the exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern, London, on view through September 7, 2014.

Taaffe writes: "From the standpoint of my own approach to things, what I have always most appreciated about his cut-outs is the absolute mobility of their freely formed elements. The sheets of drawing paper were pre-painted with gouache, then independently scissor-cut and brought to an evolving pictorial situation (a wall, or other sheets of white paper). This constituted a radical liberation from the more deliberately sequenced, chronological development of a painting. The pinning down, temporarily, of coloured paper shapes which can then be added to, exchanged, or removed from various grounds or previous iterations represented a very new and original approach to his visual research."