Pierre SOULAGES (1919-2022) "Paint (gouache) on... Lot 9

Pierre SOULAGES (1919-2022) "Paint (gouache) on paper 65cm x 50", 1973 Cassel extract, vinyl Aluminum-reinforced paper, mounted on panel Signed lower right Handwritten on the back by the artist - Countersigned Dimensions: 65 x 50 cm Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist in 1978 in the collection of Dr. Jean-Paul Levy. 1224 JUNE 2023 1324 JUNE 2023 Throughout his career, Pierre Soulages pursued a technical and formal quest the singular quality of black to convey its "authority its "authority, its gravity, its obviousness radicality" that led him to develop his famous his famous outrenoir. This long journey began in the 1940s with the distribution of his first "brous de noix a wood stain that enabled him to experiment him to experiment with the intensity and warmth of blacks and transparencies. Forced to abandon this technique only a few years after its first use, he use, he returned to it twenty years later, using an acrylic vinyl emulsion mixed with colored color powders. With this emulsion this emulsion the stability and resistance that he had been seeking for a long time. a high point in the painter's career. in the painter's career. But this moment of perfection was short-lived, only 25 paintings in walnut stain with acrylic-vinyl binder were produced on the of Soulages' more than 1,700 canvases, dated between November 11, 1970 and October 15 1977. The one we are presenting is therefore exceptional not only for its rarity, but also for the quality of a composition of vertically upright vertical forms, striated horizontally by thick brushstrokes by thick brushstrokes, skilfully playing with transparencies in the thickness of the pictorial matter. Two of the six "paintings on paper 33 x 41 cm" using a similar technique of brou de noix (walnut stain) and acrylic-vinyl binder technique produced in 1971, part of the 2005 Pierre & Colette Soulages donation to the Musée Fabre de Montpellier. These works illustrate Pierre Soulages' research, combining gesture with this material emblematic of the period. are to be compared with the lot presented. We would like to thank its director, Michel Hilaire, for this reproduction right.