Lot Essay
"It is what I make, that teaches me what I am looking for," Soulages has said. For him, his paintings have no inherent meaning in themselves, their only possible "meaning" is the one that a viewer either "constructs" or "receives" when he or she sees it. For Soulages, they are merely "a play of opacities and transparencies" from which he learns.
Approaching his work in a considered and somewhat aesthetic manner, Soulages deliberately rejects all forms of gesture or personality in his work and attempts to let the facticity of the paint and the brushmark speak for themselves. "Painting," he says, "is a constant doing without". If his work expresses anything, he claims, it is about "time and the relationship to space". Through the medium and application of paint to the surface of the canvas, Soulages aims to "trap time within the painting's space."
In this work, Soulages' majestic sweeps of black paint are softened into an imposing solid mass. By letting the opaque black paint bleed around the edges and drip by thinning it with turpentine, he fuses these seemingly random marks into a powerful compositional unity that speaks of the action of painting.
Approaching his work in a considered and somewhat aesthetic manner, Soulages deliberately rejects all forms of gesture or personality in his work and attempts to let the facticity of the paint and the brushmark speak for themselves. "Painting," he says, "is a constant doing without". If his work expresses anything, he claims, it is about "time and the relationship to space". Through the medium and application of paint to the surface of the canvas, Soulages aims to "trap time within the painting's space."
In this work, Soulages' majestic sweeps of black paint are softened into an imposing solid mass. By letting the opaque black paint bleed around the edges and drip by thinning it with turpentine, he fuses these seemingly random marks into a powerful compositional unity that speaks of the action of painting.