PAINTING
PIERRE SOULAGES, August 1, 1956
Stay with this one for a second. The painting is not about the black. That sounds wrong, because the black is the first thing you see. The black is almost everything. So how is it not about the black? Because underneath those bars, you've got the olive. The tired gold. Those brown sweeps across the lower half. That's the part that starts to work on you. And it wouldn't work like that by itself. An olive-gold painting on its own is a rug. Put these black slabs around it, and suddenly the whole ground starts to glow. That's the move. Soulages said over and over that black didn't interest him as black. It interested him because of what it did to light. The black is not the subject. It's the instrument. This one is from August 1, 1956. That's also the title. That's basically all he'll give you. Painting, August 1, 1956. No poetry. No symbolic hint. Nothing to carry out of the room except what the surface actually does. And look at how he built it. These aren't elegant brushstrokes. They're slabs. Soulages worked with palette knives, spatulas, wide blades. Tools closer to masonry than painting. Stand close and you can see the scraping, the drag, the weight of one layer pushed over another. That matters, because these black forms don't read like flat darkness. They read like structure. Barriers. Edges. Things pressing down hard enough to make the light underneath push back. So by the end, the black stops feeling like the dark part of the painting. It starts feeling like the thing that makes the light happen.