Pierre Soulages

Far beyond the borders of France, the artistic work of Pierre Soulages is regarded as unique in the rigorous radicalism with which he has devoted himself, almost exclusively, to the colour black. Born in 1919, he has been producing work of an international reputation for more than seven decades. Already in the early 1940s, Soulages was painting and etching in an abstract gestural manner, maintaining a great passion for a palette almost exclusively focused on black. In the 1940s he began to devote himself to printmaking as well as painting. In this field, he was already trying different acids and other materials to achieve the slightest nuances in black or brown tones. Since then, he has used his incomparable black, which has become part of his very essence, for the sensitive balancing of light, enhancing it to the status of a powerful gesture. Unlike other etchers of his generation, Soulages took further radical steps as early as the 1950s. As he did in his paintings, he developed a tension pattern in his etchings which, alongside the form, leaves a free white surface which is used only to increase the luminosity of the colours and thus of the light. The search for light has accompanied him throughout his life, which has meant that since the late 1970s Soulages has only dealt with the colour black, along with numerous facets and manipulations in the application of paint.