Pierre Soulages
Peinture 102 x 165 cm, 15 janvier 2020
From very early on, I practiced a kind of painting that dispensed with images that I never considered as a language (in the sense that language conveys meaning). Neither image nor language.
—Pierre Soulages
In celebration of Pierre Soulages’s 100th birthday in December 2019, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, unveiled an exhibition of his works, marking only the third time in its history (after Picasso and Chagall) that the Salon Carré has been entirely devoted to a survey of a single living artist. To create Peinture 102 x 165 cm, 15 janvier 2020, he repeatedly applied acrylic paint onto his canvas, forming accumulations of pigment that lend it the quality of a sculptural relief and create a dramatic optical interplay. Passages of brilliant blue emerge within several of the painting’s black strokes, creating a contrast of color and form both subtle and dramatic. With the artist’s first use of a blue hue together with black pigment in over a decade, this canvas marks an important return to earlier innovations within the Outrenoir series. Discussing the process of working in his studio overlooking the Mediterranean, Soulages has described the chromatic effects of light on their surfaces, stating: “From time to time, we take a canvas and hang it on the wall. Now there is one of these canvases we call ‘black.’ Some mornings it is silver gray. Other times, it is blue, capturing the reflections of the sea…. In reality, it is in accord with the light received.”
Pierre Soulages
Peinture 102 x 165 cm, 15 janvier 2020
2020
Acrylic on canvas
40 3/16 x 64 15/16 inches (102 x 165 cm)
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris