Known for years as France’s greatest living artist, Pierre Soulages created pulsating black paintings that have been a mainstay of museums around the world. He is often grouped with abstract expressionism for his dedication to exploring the medium of paint itself and for the extraordinary textures on his canvases. The first anniversary of Soulages’s death, which occurred last October when the artist was 102 years old, is commemorated in a new retrospective at the gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan titled Pierre Soulages: From Midnight to Twilight.
Soulages began to exhibit in the 1940s, soon attracting attention from tastemaking venues like the Venice Biennale and the influential Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City. He worked methodically throughout the 1960s and 1970s, producing paintings centered around bold, thick smears of black. It was in 1979 that Soulages made the discovery that was to guide his artistic output for the rest of his life, inaugurating his “outrenoir”, or “beyond black”, work. Describing his discovery, Soulages has stated that, one day in January 1979 he stood before an all-black canvas and had a revelation. “In this extreme I saw, in a sense, the negation of black. The different textures reflected more or less weakly the light and from the darkness there emanated a clarity, a pictorial light whose particular emotional power awoke my desire to paint.”
