Beyond Black

Beyond Black Commentary by Diana Lipton Cite Share Show Bible Passage As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. (Genesis 15:12) Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), often regarded as France’s greatest post-WWII painter, emphasized two formative influences: the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux he saw as a boy, and the abbey-church of Sainte-Foy de Conques where he decided to become a painter. The cave paintings shaped Soulages’s sense of time. He rejected notions of linear progress in art and sought to return to the primal colours and powerful lines he’d seen at Lascaux. They also piqued his interest in darkness: why, he asked himself, did people enter a cave to paint? The Romanesque church inspired the artist’s lifelong engagement with darkness and light. An early American champion of Soulages wrote of Sainte-Foy: there, it was no dead blackness, but a live and gently palpitating dark suffused with a subtle illumination which reached its fullness in slashes of light from the high narrow windows and the soft glow where it struck the floors and walls. (Sweeney 1972: 10–11) Years of painting with bold slashes of black, often against rich umber or white—the colours of the cave paintings and the church—led ultimately to what Soulages called ‘Outrenoir’, beyond black. By 1979, he understood that he needed no other colour. Yet, as is clear in the painting in this exhibition, Soulages wasn’t working so much with black paint as with light. Tiny points and blades of white light flash through the darkness in the places where the brush strokes don’t quite meet. But the real light is not shining through the darkness, it is emanating from it. The source of the gradations and distinctions is not different shades of black, or paint applied more thickly in one place than another. It is the way light plays on brush strokes and swipes of the palette knife on black paint. We’re seeing, as it were, in the dark, as Abram did when God appeared as a flaming torch in the deep and terrifying darkness after sunset. References Celis, Ana Maria. 2018. ‘Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, Lot 22 C, Lot Essay’, www.Christies.com, available at https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6171880 [accessed 2 December 2024] Johnson Sweeney, James. 1972. Pierre Soulages (New York: New York Graphic Society)