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Lot Essay
‘It is what I do that teaches me what I am looking for. Painting always comes before thinking.’
–Pierre Soulages
‘I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it’s a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us.’
–Pierre Soulages
Thick slabs of glossy black paint are lavishly spread across the canvas in Pierre Soulages’, Peinture 55 x 28 cm, 7 octobre 1955. Executed in bold, gestural brushstrokes, the black bars move both horizontally and vertically across the picture plane to form a grid-like structure. At moments, the paint-bars thin out, allowing glimpses of light and colour to peek through. These softer tones, of browns, white and a hint of orange, radiate warmly against the dense impenetrability of the black. The many layers of paint seem to peel back to expose an inner centre, which in turn serves to highlight the contrasting fortitude of the surrounding blackness. For Soulages, the very intensity of black imbues colour with a renewed and revitalized vigour when they are placed side by side. He explains, ‘Black, I’ve always loved. [...] It has always been the foundation of my palette. It is the absence of colour the most intense, the most violent, which gives an intense and violent presence in the colours, even white, as a tree makes the sky blue’ (P. Soulages, quoted in P. Schneider, ‘The Louvre Soulages’, in Evidence, no. 143, June 1963, p. 46-53). This exalting of his material’s innate qualities is characteristic of Soulages, who makes every decision based on the painting in front of him. He paints not as philosopher, narrator or ideologue, but as a painter: ‘It is what I do that teaches me what I am looking for,’ he has stated; ‘Painting always comes before thinking’ (P. Soulages, quoted in Pierre Soulages: Painting the Light, exh. cat., Sammlung Essl, Austria, 2006, p. 10).
An unrivalled master of the painterly exploration of light and darkness, Soulages experimented with the effects of chiaroscuro throughout the 1950s. Using an eclectic variety of tools from spoons and rakes to bits of rubber, he would apply paint in thick, impasto layers before scratching, digging and etching away at the surface, to both reveal gradients of colour emanating beneath, and create a rich assortment of textures which would catch the light at different angles. This would later come to new extremes in the development of ‘Outrenoir’ (Beyond Black) that entered his work in the late 1970s. These all-black paintings, which continue to dominate his practice to this day, contemplate and ultimately reestablish black not as an absorbent vacuum but rather as a source of light in its own right. In many ways, this present work prefigures this sumptuous play of light on textured black paint. With its sublime and tumultuous energy, it epitomizes Soulages’ artistic practice from the mid-1950s, a pivotal moment in his career in which his abstract idiom took a new and influential turn. The canvas became a bustling and dynamic arena in which the artist probed its expanses to produce a richly textured, complex composition that conveys a sense of experience, rather than meaning. As if to further eliminate any hermeneutic connotations in place of a purely emotive pictorial language, Soulages would often choose to exhibit his works in the centre of a room, commenting, ‘I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it’s a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us’ (P. Soulages, quoted in ‘Pierre Soulages: Interview by Z. Stillpass,’ Interview Magazine, May 2014). Indeed, with its lustrous translucency and reflective gleam, Peinture 55 x 28 cm, 7 octobre 1955 draws the viewer into a reflexive and inward meditation.
–Pierre Soulages
‘I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it’s a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us.’
–Pierre Soulages
Thick slabs of glossy black paint are lavishly spread across the canvas in Pierre Soulages’, Peinture 55 x 28 cm, 7 octobre 1955. Executed in bold, gestural brushstrokes, the black bars move both horizontally and vertically across the picture plane to form a grid-like structure. At moments, the paint-bars thin out, allowing glimpses of light and colour to peek through. These softer tones, of browns, white and a hint of orange, radiate warmly against the dense impenetrability of the black. The many layers of paint seem to peel back to expose an inner centre, which in turn serves to highlight the contrasting fortitude of the surrounding blackness. For Soulages, the very intensity of black imbues colour with a renewed and revitalized vigour when they are placed side by side. He explains, ‘Black, I’ve always loved. [...] It has always been the foundation of my palette. It is the absence of colour the most intense, the most violent, which gives an intense and violent presence in the colours, even white, as a tree makes the sky blue’ (P. Soulages, quoted in P. Schneider, ‘The Louvre Soulages’, in Evidence, no. 143, June 1963, p. 46-53). This exalting of his material’s innate qualities is characteristic of Soulages, who makes every decision based on the painting in front of him. He paints not as philosopher, narrator or ideologue, but as a painter: ‘It is what I do that teaches me what I am looking for,’ he has stated; ‘Painting always comes before thinking’ (P. Soulages, quoted in Pierre Soulages: Painting the Light, exh. cat., Sammlung Essl, Austria, 2006, p. 10).
An unrivalled master of the painterly exploration of light and darkness, Soulages experimented with the effects of chiaroscuro throughout the 1950s. Using an eclectic variety of tools from spoons and rakes to bits of rubber, he would apply paint in thick, impasto layers before scratching, digging and etching away at the surface, to both reveal gradients of colour emanating beneath, and create a rich assortment of textures which would catch the light at different angles. This would later come to new extremes in the development of ‘Outrenoir’ (Beyond Black) that entered his work in the late 1970s. These all-black paintings, which continue to dominate his practice to this day, contemplate and ultimately reestablish black not as an absorbent vacuum but rather as a source of light in its own right. In many ways, this present work prefigures this sumptuous play of light on textured black paint. With its sublime and tumultuous energy, it epitomizes Soulages’ artistic practice from the mid-1950s, a pivotal moment in his career in which his abstract idiom took a new and influential turn. The canvas became a bustling and dynamic arena in which the artist probed its expanses to produce a richly textured, complex composition that conveys a sense of experience, rather than meaning. As if to further eliminate any hermeneutic connotations in place of a purely emotive pictorial language, Soulages would often choose to exhibit his works in the centre of a room, commenting, ‘I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it’s a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us’ (P. Soulages, quoted in ‘Pierre Soulages: Interview by Z. Stillpass,’ Interview Magazine, May 2014). Indeed, with its lustrous translucency and reflective gleam, Peinture 55 x 28 cm, 7 octobre 1955 draws the viewer into a reflexive and inward meditation.