Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

BLACK AND WHITE

“Painting for me means working in space and with light and not so much with colours," explained Pierre Soulages, a French master of abstract painting, at the opening of his retrospective in Berlin. "That’s why I like black. Space and light are everything and everything is related. The viewer sees light on the surface of the painting which reflects back on him. Thus he finds himself standing right in the middle of this gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] of painting, space and light. The angle and the moment of vision are decisive for what you see.”

Thanks to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which honoured the artist with a retrospective for his 90th birthday last year, this fine exhibition of 70 works is now on view at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin until January 17th.

Mr Soulages attended the show's opening with his wife of 70 years, who advised the museum on the arrangement of the works. He took this as an opportunity to underline the country's importance to his career. Only three years after the end of the second world war, Ottomar Domnick, a German curator, displayed works by the young, unknown artist in a big show of French abstract painting in Stuttgart, Munich, Dusseldorf and other German cities. Mr Domnick used a painting by Mr Soulages on the poster to advertise the touring exhibition in 1948 and 1949, marking the start of the artist's international career.

Mr Soulages had his first solo exhibition in Munich in 1952, followed by his first solo exhibition in New York in 1954. The very first French Museum to display his abstract art was the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1967.

In his early works, Mr Soulages used printers’ ink, walnut stain, oil paint and occasionally tar on glass to play with the effects of dark and light, black and white. His later works are darker and larger. Since 1979, when he radically changed his painting style to what he calls “outrenoir” (‘ultra black’ or ‘beyond black’), he mainly uses resins that allow him to create gouges of different depth, length and width into the surface.

Apart from two new large-sized works, the Berlin retrospective is identical to the one in Paris. The great difference is the effect of light in the gallery spaces. Whereas the paintings in the Centre Pompidou were exposed to daylight, in the Martin Gropius Bau they are exposed to various sources of artificial light. The way the light reflects on these large-scale canvases is impressive. The deep, richness of his many shades of black is mesmerising, and often beautiful.

"Pierre Soulages" is at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin until January 17th 2011