PIERRE SOULAGES
Pierre Soulages (born 1919) began his career in post-war Paris, which was a melting pot of creativity and intellectual and philosophical debate. Yet he never joined a group or movement and his work exists in a category entirely of its own. He has worked almost exclusively with dense black paint, but in fresh, new ways, an achievement that was traced in a retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2010, and that is commemorated with a museum dedicated to his work in Rodez, Southern France.
Soulages coined the term ‘outrenoir’ (meaning ‘beyond black’) for the works he began working on in 1979, in his late period. These all-black paintings marked a turning point in his career, as they were entirely orientated towards the issue of light, which had always been relevant to his work. Black is the colour of origin of painting, since cavemen used it to paint with underground. Soulages thus explores the interaction between the notion of elemental darkness and light by showing the capacity of dense black paint to absorb and reflect light, through a variety of ribbed, striated or combed lines, ridges and troughs made on the plane of the canvas. While he initially used black paint to mark a canvas, after 1979 the artist treated it as a dense, palpable material upon which he could perform direct, physical actions such as scraping and scoring with a stiff-bristled brush or a palette knife, literally inverting his practice. Soulages sought to reveal ‘the secret light coming from the black’ – or rather ‘black light’, a term which in his words ‘designates a light that cannot be dissociated from the black that reflects it.’
Although his application of paint is bold and emphatic, Soulages insists ‘I am neither a gestural painter nor an expressionist painter.’ Rather than indicating the moment of its creation, the importance of a work by Soulages lies in its immediate presence in the moment of its encounter with the spectator. The painting becomes part of the living world, vitally responsive to the light and space of surroundings. As the viewer moves before it, the physical surface continually interacts with light and alters as a result of it. We do not merely see a painting by Soulages but experience it, both physically and visually, in a way that is constantly changing and never the same.
Since they are non-illustrative and non-figurative, the ‘outrenoir’ paintings resist linguistic definition and are titled by their physical dimensions and further specified by date. They escape not only the conventions of figurative painting, but also of abstract painting, as they remain unrelated to any pre-established concept or formula. The artist has said on several occasions, ‘For me painting always comes before theory.’ A Soulages painting therefore exists in its own right. It is at once archaic and contemporary, evoking the origins of painting as well as interacting with the present, which further grants it with the potential for continuous future relevance.