Lot Essay
"Black has always been the base of my palette. It, the most intense, the most violent absence of colour gives an intensity to the colours with it, even to white, just as a tree makes the sky seem more blue... There is nothing sentimental about my taste for black; in China black is not the colour for mourning, white is. It is simply that I see black."
Soulages has been seeing and painting black ever since as a young boy he became obsessed with the silhouette of the leafless winter trees against the sky in his home town. His paintings, he says, have no inherent meaning. They are just a "play of opacities and transparencies", the only real meaning is the one that the viewer either "constructs", or "receives" from a painting when he or she sees it. This also works for the artist too, for as he said, "It is what I make that teaches me what I am looking for."
Soulages has a perculiary ascetic approach to his work. "Painting," he says, "is a constant doing without." Not only is his palette limited primarily to black, but he has also deliberately tried to reject all form of gesture and personal style in his work in order to let the facticity of the painting speak for and define itself.
Not certain himself if his paintings can be tied down to any category of definition, he posits the explanation that they are about "time and its relationship with space, never figuration, nor its opposite, the negation of figuration." His "aim", he says, is to "trap time within the painting's space".
As this work illustrates, towards the end of the 1950s Soulages moved away from the notion of "the sign" that had characterised his earlier work and attempted what he called the "cutting of space into periods of time" by producing paintings where the brushstrokes are juxtaposed and repeated in such a way that a rapport between the painting's constituent parts and a rhythm of spatial relationships is established but also intrinsically held together within an instantly recognisable whole.
Soulages has been seeing and painting black ever since as a young boy he became obsessed with the silhouette of the leafless winter trees against the sky in his home town. His paintings, he says, have no inherent meaning. They are just a "play of opacities and transparencies", the only real meaning is the one that the viewer either "constructs", or "receives" from a painting when he or she sees it. This also works for the artist too, for as he said, "It is what I make that teaches me what I am looking for."
Soulages has a perculiary ascetic approach to his work. "Painting," he says, "is a constant doing without." Not only is his palette limited primarily to black, but he has also deliberately tried to reject all form of gesture and personal style in his work in order to let the facticity of the painting speak for and define itself.
Not certain himself if his paintings can be tied down to any category of definition, he posits the explanation that they are about "time and its relationship with space, never figuration, nor its opposite, the negation of figuration." His "aim", he says, is to "trap time within the painting's space".
As this work illustrates, towards the end of the 1950s Soulages moved away from the notion of "the sign" that had characterised his earlier work and attempted what he called the "cutting of space into periods of time" by producing paintings where the brushstrokes are juxtaposed and repeated in such a way that a rapport between the painting's constituent parts and a rhythm of spatial relationships is established but also intrinsically held together within an instantly recognisable whole.