Pierre Soulages, Walnut Stain, 48.2 x 63.4 cm_1946_Rodez, Musée Soulages © Archives Soulages/ADAGP, Paris 2019
Pierre Soulages at the Louvre ‘Soulages at the Louvre’ – This tribute exhibition sets out to trace the chronological development of Soulages’s work from 1946 to the present day, through a small selection of pieces created over eight decades. December 11, 2019 – March 9, 2020.]]>
Source: Louvre
Born on December 24, 1919, in Rodez (south of France), Soulages, who continues to produce work at a steady pace, is celebrating his 100th birthday at the end of this year. To mark this event, the Musée du Louvre is devoting an exceptional exhibition to the artist in the prestigious Salon Carré, which is located between the Galerie d’Apollon and the Grande Galerie and used to house the Paris Salon.
Pierre Soulages opted for total abstraction from the start of his career, challenging the traditional premises of painting. His was a singular approach, in the materials he used (for example, walnut stain and tar), in his tools which were more like those used by construction painters, in his decision to name his works according to their technique, dimensions and date of execution rather than with titles that would influence viewers’ perception of them. In 1948 he wrote already: “A painting is an organized whole, an ensemble of forms (lines, colored surfaces) upon which our interpretations of it emerge and fall apart.”.
This exhibition shows the continuity of the artist’s work and its various periods, each reflecting his ambition to bring out the light through contrasts between the color black and light areas, through layering and scraping, and in the manner of applying a single pigment. In 1979, when he had been a painter for more than thirty years, Soulages embarked on a new phase in his work: a quite different kind of painting that he called outrenoir – “ultrablack” or “beyond black”. Soulages’ painterly experimentations had always probed the relationship between black and light, but with outrenoir, which made use of the reflection of light, the space-time of painting took on a completely new luminous multiplicity. Contrary to a monochromatic work, “it is the differences of textures, smooth, fibrous, calm, tense or agitated that, in capturing or blocking the light, bring out the grey blacks and deep blacks.”
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