Pierre Soulages

Private collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 2008)

Pierre Encrevé, Soulages: L’Oeuvre complet. Peintures, IV. 1997-2013, Paris 2015, no. 1372, pp. 226-227, illustrated in color (wrong dimensions)

« Soulages always paid close attention to the distinction between matte black and glossy black, regularly emphasizing that there is not one black but countless different blacks depending on a host of parameters. » Pierre Encrevé, Les Peintures 1946–2006, Paris, 2007, p. 359.

Among the large-format Outrenoirs, Peinture 243 x 181 cm, 16 octobre 2007 holds a singular place : a triptych of three superimposed elements, the work unfolds across nearly two and a half metres of surface structured into contrasting zones, fine vertical striations in the upper section, thick and lustrous horizontal marks at the centre, a smoother and deeper plane below. Each captures and reflects light in its own way, giving the whole a rhythm that renews itself with every movement of the viewer.

Executed in acrylic, the canvas reflects Soulages' mastery of a medium he adopted progressively from 2004 onwards. Through repeated and precise gestures, scrapers, blades, wide brushes, he builds a surface of pronounced relief in which heavily striated areas of intense reflection oppose passages of deep, matte black. Black does not function here as colour in the traditional sense, but as an active surface whose multiple states shift with each movement of the viewer: there is not one black but countless different blacks depending on a host of parameters (Pierre Encrevé, Les Peintures 1946–2006, Paris, 2007, p. 359). It is precisely this unsuspected richness that the work reveals to those who take the time to look.

Soulages' engagement with black is rooted in a double fascination: first with the prehistoric cave art of southern France, which he had absorbed since adolescence, and then with the art informel of the 1950s, developed in contact with contemporaries such as Hans Hartung. From those earliest marks traced on the dark walls of ancient caves, he drew the idea of a painting that acts instead of representing, that reveals something of the world instead of describing it. His fascination gradually shifted toward the very substance of pictorial matter, a preoccupation that finds its most radical expression in the Outrenoir.

The genesis of this discovery was as fortuitous as it was decisive. In January 1979, after hours of fruitless work, Soulages covered an entire canvas in black. He understood then that he had opened a new path: no longer painting with black, but with the light that black reflects and transforms. From this revelation emerged the Outrenoir; a term he coined himself to designate what lies beyond black, a light transmuted by black (Pierre Soulages, preface to Dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur : le noir, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2005, pp. 13–14). For Soulages, black precedes light; it is the very condition of light's appearance — a conviction that runs through his entire body of work and lends to his work a density that is at once pictorial and philosophical.

Peinture 243 x 181 cm, 16 octobre 2007 transforms as the viewer moves, as the light shifts, as the eye learns to discern what the surface holds. This canvas affirms its author's deepest conviction that his instrument was no longer black, but that secret light born of black (Pierre Soulages, Écrits et propos, Paris, Hermann, 2009, p. 58).