French painter Pierre Soulages died at the age of 102, leaving an important pictorial legacy that expanded the possibilities of the color black, the president of the museum that bears his name in the French city of Rodez, Alfred Pacquement, reported Wednesday.
“It’s sad news, I just spoke to his widow, Colette Soulages,” Pacquement told the French news agency AFP, a longtime friend of the popular artist known for his paintings in endless shades of black, author of the concept of metaphysical black. , whose production suitable for all audiences is part of the collections of the largest museums in the world.
Born in Rodez, Aveyron, on December 24, 1919, Soulages died in Nimes, French engraver and sculptor recognized as “the black painter” for the use of this color in his abstract works and representative of tachism, derived from the French word tache, literally stain, which was a style of French abstract painting developed in the 1940s and 1950s often considered the European equivalent of abstract expressionism.
“I like the authority of the black man, his seriousness, his evidence and radicalism, he has unsuspected possibilities”Soulages had synthesized in an interview with AFP in 2019, on the occasion of an exhibition inaugurated in December of that year at the Louvre, a museum that opened its doors to him in his lifetime, a rare recognition.
Soulages’ paintings are gigantic black spots that in 2013 made him the best-priced French artist in his country. The price of his works has increased by 500 percent in recent decades, with some of his paintings being valued at three million euros.
In 2009, his retrospective at the Pompidou became the most visited exhibition of contemporary art in the history of the French cultural center, with half a million visitors.
Despite being little known abroad, Soulages was one of the most popular artists in Francerepresentative of a non-elitist abstraction, with a work that generates an unexpected emotional response, linked to the metaphysical depth of primitive art that encloses the absolute black of his paintings, an analogy of when humans locked themselves in the darkness of their caves to dirty the walls with their paintings.
Soulages called this movement “outrenoir”, ultra-black: “black was no longer a color in my painting, but a state of mind. I invented that word because I wanted to go beyond the merely optical or plastic aspect. For me, the important thing in black was not the visual, but the experience: that color stirs everything that inhabits us, emotions and memories, it reaches regions of our interior that other colors never reach”, he summarized in an interview to the Spanish newspaper El País.
