DIn the color-addicted 20th century, it felt like lean food. Black images. Always black. Isn’t black reserved for mourning? The bleak side of life? What do they want, what are they hiding, these sublime surfaces on which black lines of paint form monumental architecture, as if the battlements of Troy had to be erected all over again?
Expansive curves that appear like heroized Japanese characters. Or pictures in which the white background has completely disappeared and the night black rises up like an insurmountable wall. And then again pictures in which the light plays in the relief of the thickly applied black paint, so that it looks like shimmering lights in rippled water. Black images. Always black. A long life as a painter.
Pierre Soulages knew early on where his path would lead. And he never went astray and was not seduced by any of the coloristic provocations that he experienced on his artistic journey through the century. The beginnings go back to the early 1940s. Surrealism had petrified, had forgotten all the art of surprise. The tachists attacked their canvases like furies and painted their melancholy from their souls. It took Soulages a day or two, as he has repeatedly said, to know that he cannot learn anything in the Parisian environment.
One thinks of charred firewood
When the German occupiers became dangerous, Pierre Soulages went into hiding with a wine grower in Montpellier and painted his first pictures, in which the black web of lines visibly tried to slow down the drive of informal contemporary art. You think of charred firewood piling up over your own ashes. At times, the dark tangle is reminiscent of an evening walk in the forest, when the trees move closer together and here and there a remnant of the sun or a scrap of blue sky shines through.
There was no lack of lofty reflection on Black’s nuanced offer. The pictures were understood existentialistically, they were interpreted as illustrations of what had become fashionable as “being thrown into life” or, even more daringly, as objectifications or visualizations of Heidegger’s being-unto-death. But despite all efforts, it has been overlooked that black does not just mean non-color, but is much more the correlate of light and to the same extent that it appears as a refusal of light, it can also be a sheer promise of light.
Soulages in his exhibition “Outrenoir paintings” 2016
What: picture alliance / abaca / Adventurer Patrick
The more sensitive observer soon recognized the enormous sensual potential from which Soulages’ work unflinchingly drew. And it was always like relief from the discourse pressure of contemporary art that this painting made absolutely no offers of understanding. Especially today, when the arts almost outdo each other in their strained world conditions. Apart from the fact that recent contemporary painting is largely figurative or representational, every abstract picture has always wanted to say something, even if it was just a matter of freeing the world from its objects or countering the disorder of things with planned proposals for order.
Without many words, Pierre Soulages – in black for black – confessed to his incompetence for the world image. His pictures never wanted to express, show, reveal, decode or encode anything. They never wanted to be an elitist secret language that was only open to the initiated. Your unshakable trust in black must have been all the more irritating.
The work did not cause a sensation. Don’t want to do. Unlike his friend Hans Hartung, who adapted to changing visual needs with seasonal speed, Soulages stuck to his signless signs, carefully closing the light gaps between the black entablature, drowning the last forms in monochrome and finally discovering the charm of the surface.
Soulages plowed through the black paint mush with his painting equipment and, without any directing at all, allowed the daylight to be reflected, sometimes brighter, sometimes darker, by the fine grooves and ridges in the dried black. He called it “outrenoir”, beyond black or if you want to translate it with spiritual high spirits: black transcendence.
Encountering a mysterious work
In doing so, Pierre Soulages has had all the success that an artist of the 20th century can have. Exhibitions in the most important museums, a stable art market presence, his own museum in Rodez in southern France, where he was born in 1919, the “Grand Cross” of the French Legion of Honor, the Praemium Imperiale, which is equivalent to a Nobel Prize in art. And yet: he was never a star, and he wasn’t a public painter either.
When Udo Kittelmann showed a large exhibition in the Burda Museum in Baden-Baden almost two years ago, the astonishment was great. For a whole generation it was like the first encounter with an enigmatic work. It was never close. Over the years and decades it has become more and more distant. And the further away, the more immortal the painter appeared with his indefatigable black variants. Pierre Soulages has died after all. At Christmas he would have been 103 years old.