In any event the exposure is difficult to access

Pierre Soulages is one of the glories of French painting. It will be 90 years old in December. Since 1949, he painted in an abstract manner and it is. Her paintings are an impressive sobriety. A huge exhibition of Centre Pompidou, showing more than a hundred works him tribute. But it should not be obscure the face, by conformity. Quickly, the exhibition is boring, no doubt because it gives great importance to the recent paintings. The artist, who today lives part time in Sète, a dogmatic nature. The route is chanted his sentences, explaining how it works and how to look at his painting. Example: "the light from the canvas to the viewer creates a space before the canvas and the Viewer is located in this space: there is a snapshot in the vision for each point of view."Or: "what is important in the first place is the reality of the painted canvas: color, shape, material of the painted canvas."

To renew art while staying true to a steering wire that guides and motivates its creativity is a challenge. Pierre Soulages has invented something but failed to find a new spring. Unless hooking, too sobre, is not sufficient to reveal the mystical dimension of his work. In any event, the exposure is difficult to access. However, it requires to wonder about the quality of an abstract painting. Abstract canvas is successful when it suggests a sensation. According to Soulages, "a painting is an organization, a set of relationships between forms, which are to be and rid the senses that it is him."

It is, for example, a glow, a small little white as behind a poorly closed curtain, in a huge canvas of 3.6 m long for the black remaining, completed in 1968. -The sense that is it ready, it can be in 1971 this painting where the artist gesture trace Brown Forms dark as a calligraphy in white space.

A contemplative desire

The exhibition also provides an opportunity to review the work of the 1950s and 1960s, of great interest. It has not yet embraced the religion of the black point, even if her paintings are already dark. The painting is very thick, layered superimposed different shades with suspicion of red, blue, white, Khaki green or orange. There is also his clearly visible gesture banging of brush on the canvas. We feel that the artist is still... and that there. He said in 1953: "This is what I'm doing that tells me what I'm looking."

Subsequently, remedy exclusive black, even though it does provide another explanation also be interpreted as an expression of a contemplative desire of an evasive "because", curiously written on one of the walls of the exhibition, a sort of withdrawal of the world - or even work on a painting become sculpture, because it would be more material. This is certainly to indicate this desire that the canvases of the end are hanging in space and not on the walls. As works in three dimensions. Soulages speaks of "outrenoir" to mean that the games of light on black give "grey black or deep black".The material is smoothed, flat, ridged, engraved with variants and rhythms. Marcel Duchamp said that in art the Viewer is half of the work. In a very different style, Pierre Soulages seems to expect more of him.

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