Matisse's cut-outs a riot of colour, movement and imagination

Scissors, paper, pins - these were all it took for Henri Matisse, in the last years of his life, often bedridden and feeling he was living on borrowed time, to create the works that now fill galleries at London's Tate Modern.

And what a joyous, fascinating exhibition it is.

Ravishing, filled with light and decoration, exuberance and a kind of violence, "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" is about more than just pleasure. It charts not simply the consummation of the artist's long career, but a kind of self-usurpation. In his last years, Matisse went beyond himself.

As well as the works themselves, there is film footage of the artist and his assistants at work, swatches of the hand-painted papers he used, and a wealth of photographic and other material to broaden our understanding.

At the heart of the show is Matisse's sinuous cutting and slicing, not just of paper but of space itself - the scissor-sharp separation and cleaving of colour and blankness, depth and flatness, punch and retreat; energy held in check and then released. Matisse created a universe that filled the room around him, spilling from the walls to the floor. "Space has the boundaries of my imagination," the artist said.

Colour dances, and our eyes dance with it, following contours and edges, sliding from shape to shape, wallowing in a whiteness that becomes electric, jumping from positive to negative and back again. There is no stasis, no arrest, but a constant discovery of newness at every turn: a swallow swerves in flight, a shark swims the wall. Pinned to his chest, Icarus' heart explodes. Foliage proliferates and bees swarm. A mermaid appears, where a thoughtful blue nude once sat, watched by a parakeet.

The exhibition takes us from the late 1930s to the artist's death in 1954, from his use of cut-out slips of paper as aide-memoires and tools in the composition of his paintings and try-outs for projects, to the cut-paper collages he made for books.

An entire room is devoted to his book and the collages he made for it. A great deal of space is given over to his preparatory material for the chapel at Vence. But we keep coming back to a single room, both studio and bedchamber and the place where he slept and dreamt and suffered from cancer and other miseries and where, when he awoke, he found himself in the midst of his work.