Who is Pierre Soulages?
Pierre Soulages is a French painter born in 1919 in Rodez, considered today as one of the greatest living artists in the world.
A painter of radical abstraction, he is particularly known for his use of the black color, at the service of light and matter.
In 1940, he left the South of France and settled in Paris to begin his first abstract works. Called "brous de noix" (walnut shells), he creates them from a natural pigment extracted from walnut bark and inspired by the ancestral techniques of the Chinese calligraphy. He then became fascinated by the contrast between the dark of the material that reveals the whiteness and the light of the white paper.
Post War years were essential in the artist's carreer as he radically entered into abstraction and exhibited regularly in New York, the new hub of art.
Black became an obsession and a quest for Soulages. The light reflecting on the surface plays a major role in this work where the color is deep and that he describes as Outrenoir. At the end of the 1970s, his works are more physical, they call for reliefs, notches and scrapings in the dark matter that becomes the setting for the light.
Pierre Soulages is one of the last great figures of modern art and his career is crowned by the opening of a museum dedicated to his work in 2014 in Rodez.
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