The French painter Pierre Soulages, remembered for being an uncompromising creator and obsessed with the color black, has died this Wednesday at the age of 102, according to his friend Alfred Pacquement, president of the museum that bears his name in the city of Rodez. “It’s sad news, I just spoke to his widow, Colette Soulages,” Pacquement explained in French media.
The artist sparked his interest in art during his childhood. He was inspired by the landscapes of his hometown, Aveyron, and always felt a certain attraction towards abstract art, the genre that characterizes him. And not only that, but dark colors, especially black, also caught his attention; a color to which he knew how to give light despite the lack of pigmentation and brilliance.
Soulages, a slender man always dressed in a black suit, became for more than 75 years one of the most influential and highly valued French painters in the art world thanks to works such as Brou de Noix, Groudon sur verre, Peinture or Lithographie 27 .
Starting in the 1950s, his pictorial technique evolved. He discovered other types of tools and added materials and textures to his paintings, such as bronze, with which he achieved his period of greatest success and splendor.
In 2019 Soulages celebrated its centenary at the Louvre, where it sold one of its works from 1960 for €9.6 million, a world record. “I like the authority of black, its seriousness, its obviousness, its radicalism (…) Black has unsuspected possibilities,” he explained in December during the event, becoming one of the privileged few to have the Louvre at his feet. “In what I do now, it is the reflections of light that you see. The light changes, as in Conques, where from morning to night the stained glass windows are never the same. The same could be said of my black paintings. If whoever looks at them moves before them, he realizes how they are changing. When you look at them, his presence corresponds to the moment of the eye”, he confided in an interview with La Vanguardia in May 2014.
