Pierre Soulages
Peinture, 11 juillet 1965, 1965
(Painting, 11 July 1965)
Oil on canvas, 190 x 300 cm

Pierre Soulages (Rodez, France, 1919) was one of the most important figures of abstract art in the second half of the 20h century. He marked a turning point in the formulation of abstract painting in France and abroad, due to his long career as an artist and the many exhibitions of his work, as well as his contributions to plastic art. After moving to Paris to take the admission exam to the art school École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts and beginning his studies there, Soulages rejected the school’s standardised teaching and returned to his hometown. Taking refuge in Montpellier during World War II, he moved to Paris in 1946 and focussed solely on painting. From then on, he used different media and techniques (engraving, watercolour, canvas, stained glass) with which he explored the potential of the materials on plastic surfaces. He rented a studio in Rue Victor Schoelcher in Paris, allowing him to work on unusually large canvases, which would become one of the characteristics of his work and a benchmark for the members of the group of French artists and the movement known as Supports/Surfaces that appeared around 1965. The scale and size of Soulages’ paintings even surpassed those of the works of contemporary American artists. This aspect was defended by the gallerist Samuel Kootz, with whom Soulages maintained a lasting artistic and commercial relationship. Kootz contended that the artist’s painting and his contained and firm gestural style required such large dimensions in order to be developed.
Several aspects of Soulages’ work stand out, aside from the dimensions of his canvases. In physical and material terms, of note are his notion of gesture and consideration of material before colour – which he held as an abstract value –, in addition to the progressive reduction of his palette of colours over the years, which culminated in a style he called outrenoir (beyond black). The predominance of black and Soulages’ efforts to draw attention to it and its qualities (dense, viscous, diluted), starting with and painting on the surface, allowed him to discover the potential of uneven surfaces, which he created by making visible the richness, effectiveness and categorisation of effects generated by the material (chiefly, the colour black). From a conceptual point of view, but rooted with the physical part of his work, what stands out is his stubborn insistence on eliminating from the fabric any attempt to create a significant image. He acknowledged that, from 1948 onwards, at the start of his career, "I’ve practised a kind of painting that turned away from the image, and I've never considered it a language (in the sense of a language that transmits a meaning). Neither image nor language". For Soulages, painting is neither illusion nor representation nor does it construct an image that refers to something existing in the physical world or to an abstract idea. In his case, the power of the image would be that of a correlation of forces – among gesture, surface and material – that manages to be projected to the viewer.
The work Peinture, 11 juillet 1965 (Painting, 11 July 1965) reflects these characteristics of Soulages’ work. Its title reflects the day and moment of its creation, with no intention of adding any references to narratives, emotions or moods. Furthermore, the gestural value of his painting does not lie in the intention of transmitting a state of alarm or transferring the irrational sphere of the artist’s self, as might be the case of American abstract expressionists. For Soulages, the said value lies in a precise gesture that reveals the concentration necessary for the development of his work, which involved the arrangement of material on the surface. As observed in this work, the artist reserves black – the main element in his painting since the 1950s – for the capacity of structuring the canvas and giving it rhythm. White and yellow provide contrast and amplify the capacity of black to structure the surface and to provide the work with internal logic.
Describing his creative process, Soulages indicated that art begins with the decision regarding the tools to be used; often knives, wool or pieces of leather – materials that, in theory, are foreign to painting –, in addition to brushes. Each tool allowed him to explore the world of forms that may be generated and the potential of the surface, especially in his larger canvases. Therefore, as this work shows us, through the application of colour on the surface, the artist summons and develops "in the very gesture, at the precise moment, the colour, the form and the material".

References
Jean-Michel Le Lannou, Soulages, la plénitude du visible, Éditions Kimé, Paris, 2001.
Pierre Encrevé and Alfred Pacquement (eds.), Soulages, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009.
Robert Fleck and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pierre Soulages, Manuella éditions, Paris, 2017.
R. Robles Tardío