Soulages, 90 peintures sur toile et 90 peintures sur papier (book)

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Soulages, 90 peintures sur toile et 90 peintures sur papier / Soulages, 90 paintings on canvas and 90 paintings on paper (book) by Pierre Encrevé, Publisher Gallimard, 2009. Hardcover book in French in its box in very good condition despite some marks on the cover, like new for the interior. Format 24.00 x 31.50 x 4.20 cm. 304 pages.

If we look at my paintings in their diversity, Soulages told me about his last Parisian retrospective, their succession appears not as a fatality, but as the exercise of a freedom: freedom of the painter, freedom of painting, freedom promised to the one who disarms his gaze before the work in order to try to see it. We have chosen together the ninety paintings on canvas that are here among all those that he has painted in already sixty years of free exercise.

The existence of the catalogue raisonné of his painting on canvas from 1946 to 1997 gives to the collection gathered here a particular meaning: not to try to make discover the work in all its magnitude, but to propose an ordered series of paintings where the gaze of the painter himself grasps the deployment of his work in its singularities, its lines of force, its rhythms, its diversity, in its unity, its incessant renewal in the formidable permanence of the affirmation of a greatness of painting and in painting.” Pierre Encrevé.

What escapes words, what is found in the most obscure, in the most secret of a painting, that is what interests me.” There is an intimacy in Soulages’ paintings on paper for the painter, no doubt, who exhibits them only rarely, as if to preserve his connection of proximity for longer, but even more so for the viewer: when the immense polyptychs on canvas force him to keep his distance and move in front of them, without however managing most often to grasp the whole in a single glance, the papers, even the largest, on the contrary encourage a close-up look, offer themselves to the simultaneous grasp of their entire surface, invite motionless meditation. They propose an emotion of another nature, where the violence of the tête-à-tête with the vertical signs of the early years, just like the Apollonian luminosity of the colored fields of recent years or the luminous crackle of the last “black and white” acquire an incomparable intensity. In the paintings on paper, by contrast or by transparency, concentrated or dispersed, spread or agitated, the light of Soulages, the closer I get to it, the more I am faced with its secret.

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