After 1945, Pierre Soulages rediscovered the color black—not as darkness, but as a source of light. While the Abstract Expressionists in New York revered black as “sacred lapis lazuli", as art historian David Sylvester aptly put it (quoted from: Exhibition catalog Black Paintings, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Ostfildern 2006, p. 11), Soulages developed a unique aesthetics that transforms darkness into light.
Born in Rodez in 1919, a visit to the Romanesque Abbey of Conques in the early 1930s awakened Soulages's passion for art. After World War II, he developed his unmistakable interplay of color and surface. His works do not depict anything—they create worlds of their own. He was particularly fascinated with the diversity of black: at times it condenses into massive structures, at others it is translucent. From the gestural, expressive compositions of the 1950s to the “Outrenoir” paintings created from 1979 onward, wherein the color structure itself becomes a carrier of light, black in all its nuances remains Soulages’ central medium.
In the 1940s, his works on paper laid the foundation for his later, fascinating oeuvre. The “Brou de noix”, a stain made from the green husk of the walnut and used in woodworking, played a key role in this process. Soulages described it as a material of contrasts: liquid and viscous, transparent and opaque, clearly contoured and blurred. This alchemical quality allows him to engage in an immediate, meditative interaction with the work. Applied with brushes and palette knives, the brown-black stain condenses into penetrating and veiled structures.
Our 2004 work stands out as a particularly beautiful piece in which these material properties are impressively concentrated on the canvas. While the brown field appears almost translucent in its consistency, it finds its high-contrast counterpart in the austerity of the black stripe and the luminous white of the paper. This work brings together everything that makes Soulages’ art so unique: radical clarity and, at the same time, complex depth, transparency, and opacity. A painting that does not obscure, but rather reflects and transforms light. [AW]