Pierre Soulages - Une Expérience au présent

Opera Gallery Paris

06 May - 12 June 2021

For the first time in its history, Opera Gallery is launching a solo exhibition of Pierre Soulages. Standing as a fierce commitment to show how retrospective or chronological combinations are not necessarily paramount of solo shows, this carefully designed curation aims at revealing how rich and alive is the artist’s practice, even now. Since his fortuitous 1979 “painting accident” were black paint covered an entire canvas, Pierre Soulages developed the neologism and concept of Outrenoir (literally “beyond black”). “As people say ‘Outre-Rhin’, across the Rhine or ‘Outre-Manche’, across the Channel, it’s another way to envision painting”, as he stated. Since then, Pierre Soulages has never stopped questioning matter and offering us watchers – should we be experienced or neophyte – an experience of light, which is by essence changeable and unstable. Standing in front of an Outrenoir is indeed accepting a certain pace, dynamics, a mobility linked to the incidence of lighting or to a change of position, no matter how minimal it is, and accepting a path that leads to a solitary and unavoidable inner experience. It is a journey, an integration into a moving work – one that never ceases to change depending on one’s focal point and the chosen lighting – and finally meeting oneself.