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How did Henri Matisse use complementary colors in his Fauvist paintings?

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Henri Matisse stands in a studio wearing a painter's smock, holding a palette beside a wooden ladder, with abstract artwork visible in the background. — Henri Matisse French artist Henri Matisse, photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1913.

During the summer of 1905, while painting in Collioure, Henri Matisse moved away from the structured, additive color techniques of Neo-Impressionism and embraced a more spontaneous approach to color.1

In his Fauvist works, Matisse utilized complementary colors to create an emotional and energetic display on the canvas. He specifically employed these pairings to achieve a vibrant, expressive effect:

Red against green
Orange against blue
Yellow against violet

By applying these colors in spontaneous, forceful brushstrokes rather than the small, calculated dots of pointillism, Matisse transformed his canvases into intense emotional displays. This bold use of pure, brilliant color, often applied straight from the tube, was a hallmark of the Fauve style, which sought to define picture space through the movement of color rather than traditional three-dimensional perspective.12