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Pierre Soulages. Black Light This is the first retrospective exhibition of Pierre Soulages, one of the most prominent exponents of modern French abstract painting, to be held in Russia. The 37 works, while making no claim to provide a comprehensive characterization of the artist's oeuvre, form a sort of gallery of his output spanning more than 50 years (from 1948 to January 2001) and give visitors an idea of his many-sided and original talent. Soulages himself designed the layout of the exhibition that accords with the shape of the Nicholas Hall, an exceptionally bright room that is the largest in the Winter Palace. The nine works on paper and glass and the twenty-eight canvases are placed in such a way that they reflect five stages in the artist's work that pass one into another: the period of dark symbols on a light background (the initial stage); the period of “colour” paintings or black forms accompanied by one or two colours; the period of black-and-white painting in the late 1960s when the format of the works increased substantially; the period of “ultra-black” immense triptychs, squares, rectangles etc. in the 1980s–90s; and the painting of recent years marked by new relationships of black and white. The more-than-fifty-year career of Pierre Soulages, an artist with a remarkable integrity of nature, is marked by an exceptionally organic logic of creative evolution. Soulages first became talked about following his showing at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris in 1947. He rapidly attained fame, picking up several prestigious international prizes. His work was rated highly by the high priests of the Avant Garde — Picabia and Léger. They were attracted by his innate sense of colour and an indisputable ability to organize space in a painting. From the outset dark tones and black dominated in the artist's works. They were applied broadly and with assurance using very wide artist's brushes and even mop-like brushes. No other European adopted black in such a radical manner. The obsession with black emerges in Soulages's case from the effort to express the substance of light which is important for him as for few others. Black naturally gives the most powerful contrast. The artist has said “regarding me, I paint above all for myself” — an admission that throws some light on the foundations of his aesthetics. Soulages belongs to the generation whose philosophy expressed itself in Existentialism. This generation that had experienced one of the most terrible of all conflicts, the Second World War, keenly sensed its isolation in an indifferent, or even hostile world, and for that reason insisted on freedom of self-expression, on the uniqueness of the individual gesture. In the final analysis Soulages's art is the painting of gesture, not an anarchic gesture, however, but one brought up on his homeland's extremely rich traditions in painting. Soulages's painting is always architectonic and it is that quality, together with a chromatic refinement inseparable from restraint and a sense of innate dignity, that sets it apart from the works of many other abstractionist painters. If we discount the early canvases that still reflect the influence of the Far East and were guided by the grammar of the construction of the hieroglyph, but even in that case had a structurality, all his subsequent works are capable of evoking associations with natural phenomena or their results, those in which the architectonic expresses itself extremely distinctly. They may call to mind trees crowding in a forest, the succession of layers in rocks or some other form of stratification, streams of rain and so on. Yet in itself that associativity does not explain the paintings. Abstract painting is in its fundamentals akin to music: both art forms can express the interrelationship between the human being and time. This takes place (and here Soulages's painting provides a splendid example) when, submitting to the profound impulses of the soul, the artist in his constructs moves towards a certain order that, in the words of Igor Stravinsky, “evokes in us an emotion of an utterly special character that has nothing in common with our reactions to the impressions of everyday life. |
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