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France celebrates its greatest living artist
AFP - Wednesday, October 14
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Oils, inks and acrylics of all sizes but almost all in black go on show Wednesday as France celebrates its best-known living artist, Pierre Soulages, a painter obsessed with the power of black. Turning 90 next December and hailed as one of the key international figures of post-war abstraction, some 100 works spanning his career are on show at Paris' Pompidou Centre until next March.
PARIS (AFP) - – Oils, inks and acrylics of all sizes but almost all in black go on show Wednesday as France celebrates its best-known living artist, Pierre Soulages, a painter obsessed with the power of black.
Turning 90 next December and hailed as one of the key international figures of post-war abstraction, some 100 works spanning his career are on show at Paris' Pompidou Centre until next March.
"It is touching to see 63 years of my work brought together," said Soulages, a big slow-moving man appropriately and as per usual dressed in black at a pre-launch tour of the canvases.
"But I don't much like the word retrospective," he added. "I am still painting, I have works drying in the studio."
Soulages, who works in southern France in a studio looking out over the sparkling Mediterranean, is famously known for switching direction halfway through his career to emphasise how light is reflected from the colour black -- a concept he calls "ultra black", or "outrenoir".
Using thick layers of black paint, he scrapes and digs and etches using bits of rubber or spoons or tiny rakes to create smooth and rough textures that absorb or reject light, subtly changing monotonous black.
"I was always interested in black, even as a child," he said. "I used black paint and when someone asked what I was painting I said 'snow'. I think with hindsight that I used black to make the paper look more white."
"At home I have an 'outrenoir' canvas facing the sea that changes colour according to the weather," he added. "I have even seen it turn blue."
"Ultra-black is like another country," Soulages said.
Black had been an obsession with artists since the dawn of humanity, he said. "Why did people in prehistoric times draw in black inside dark black caves when they could've used chalk?"
Works by Soulages, who in 2001 became the first living painter to be given an exhibition by the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, never have titles, instead being named by size and date of production.
Born in southern France, he began painting in his teens, showing his first works after the war in 1947 when friends such as Hans Hartung and Francis Picabia were dabbling in reds and blues and yellows.
Soulages instead opted for the walnut stain used on furniture to create geometric works on paper or canvas, and even tried daubings of dark tar on glass for a time.
At 33 he showed at the prestigious Venice Biennale and held his first solo New York exhibition just two years later.
Through the years black featured heavily in his works but it was not until 1979 that he switched course to the huge "outrenoir" canvases of the last three decades.
"My work has changed," he said. "What you see here we chose from 2,000 works."
"I think I make paintings so that those who look at them, myself like everybody else, can find themselves in front of them, alone with themselves," he once said.
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