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SOULAGES
From April 24 to June 27, 2014, Dominique Lévy and Galerie
Perrotin are jointly presenting "Pierre Soulages," the first
American exhibition in ten years devoted to the most significant and
internationally recognized living artist of France. By juxtaposing Soulages'
revelatory recent paintings with a group of his important postwar works,
"Pierre Soulages" highlights profound interconnections between
Europe and America in modern and contemporary art while challenging
certainties on the subject. This exhibition also coincides with the
release of the first major book devoted to the artist's years of intense
engagement with the United States, distributed by D.A.P., "Soulages
in America." During the years following World War II, Soulages
exhibited extensively in America, establishing close ties with New York
peers Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler
and many others. Indeed, during time of war, America has been a land
of refuge for many European artists; we remember the exile of the Surrealists
in New York during World War I. As a virtuoso, Pierre Soulages paints black as he could paint the light. Despite a lack of perspective and an afocal image, the artist creates an "outre-tombe" (beyond the grave) black, with an abyssal depth and intensity, breaking positivist rules. With his monochromatic or rather his "achromatic" work, Soulages creates a pictorial and physical feat. Indeed, black, which is supposed to neither reflect nor emit any part of the visible light spectrum, is more luminous than ever. Games of substance enable games of light. The substance is brutalized, stretched on canvas, snatched, brushed with more or less intensity, flattened, smoothed or put in relief; matte or shiny, the light reflection gives it life.
Between its sobriety, strength and mystery, Soulages' black is an almost authoritarian style. A color symbol of both anarchy and the occult, black and his black in particular seem to possess an almost rebellious presence. This impression is magnified by the format of the works, which gain in monumentality. Most of the time they are polyptychs.
In this exhibition, the paintings are hung like openings on immaculate white walls. Like a metaphor of doors of darkness, the canvas becomes the object of perspective of the wall, giving rise to a perfect symbiosis between the work and its installation. The painting becomes guts in the wall. Depending on the viewer, it can seem to be an opening to the world, an opening on death, an abstract and modern version of the "Gates of Hell" by Rodin, an otherworldliness liberating for some or anxious for someone else. The black is sometimes scarred or striated, letting through the white in the background, as a kind of mise en abyme of the opening. There are multiple "wounds" as if to emphasize the wrenching experience of real life.
A contemplative state is conducive to perceiving a more sensitive and deep reality. In Plato, contemplation is a path to the symbolism of light, both visual and philosophical light, light meaning knowledge. This conceptual statement about light appears, for this exhibition, to have a specific resonance, as seeing because Soulages works with light and gives it the same double meanings. Pierre Soulages stated, "'Outrenoir' also means a country other than black, a mental field all its own." The antichronilogical order of this exhibition immerses us into the world of this singular and prominent artist. In the progression of the exhibit, the black is stripped away, guiding us to see the evolution of his work.
Forsaking figures and devoting himself to gesture and movement, the
artist invokes a metaphysical world that everyone is able to internalize.
Radiant in his ideas, radiant in his aura, Soulages presents a blackness
of contemplation and works of spatiality, which are magnificently put
into perspective by Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin.
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