Painting

/ Pierre Soulages /

In Painting, Pierre Soulage uses a process of removing paint and scraping to reveal lighter colours beneath. The base colour – yellow ochre in this instance – therefore appears in a subtle interplay of opacity and transparency. Light is merely intensified by contrast with shades of black. Soulage also earned the recognition of French art institutions and was one of the first living artists of the post-war period to be given a retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Right up until 1979, he established a contrastive relationship in his painting between the presence and absence of black in the foreground and the use of colour to break up the background from which the light source emerges.