.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Please note this work will be sold with a photo-certificate signed by the artist and dated Paris 12 Mai 2006.
Composition was painted in 1950, just after Soulages' discovery and development of abstraction. Already, this picture features the bold thick lines of glistening dark oil paints that have become so wholly associated with his works. During the early 1940s, he had painted pictures in which the branches of trees were seen as though from below, forming a latticework effect of dark bars against the bright sky. In his abstract paintings, this was taken a step further, yet the origins can still be discerned in the gloaming-like luminosity of the background. Against this light, blocking it out, are the bars of impastoed paint with which Soulages is best associated.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Soulages was little interested in colour and colour contrasts. Composition is built up through an accumulation of forms that speak of an intense and engaging visual rhythm and energy. This is in part a tribute to his friend Sonia Delaunay, who first introduced Soulages to the potential of abstract art when she met him in the mid-1940s. In Composition, the accumulation of bars of dark paint against the lighter background have an internal energy that recalls the pictures of Sonia and her husband Robert Delaunay. This is a brooding reincarnation of their Orphism, made relevant again for a post-War generation. It is therefore a very different energy that Soulages has found in his painting, compared to that of the Delaunays: Soulages has managed to create an image that taps into elemental forces, into a Manichean struggle between the darkness and the light. Most importantly, though, Composition is an adventure in paint. The canvas bears the scars of the artist's own struggle with art, with inspiration, with his materials: this is a lexicon of techniques, a celebration of the versatility of oils, and a record of Soulages' own actions in painting it.
Composition was painted in 1950, just after Soulages' discovery and development of abstraction. Already, this picture features the bold thick lines of glistening dark oil paints that have become so wholly associated with his works. During the early 1940s, he had painted pictures in which the branches of trees were seen as though from below, forming a latticework effect of dark bars against the bright sky. In his abstract paintings, this was taken a step further, yet the origins can still be discerned in the gloaming-like luminosity of the background. Against this light, blocking it out, are the bars of impastoed paint with which Soulages is best associated.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Soulages was little interested in colour and colour contrasts. Composition is built up through an accumulation of forms that speak of an intense and engaging visual rhythm and energy. This is in part a tribute to his friend Sonia Delaunay, who first introduced Soulages to the potential of abstract art when she met him in the mid-1940s. In Composition, the accumulation of bars of dark paint against the lighter background have an internal energy that recalls the pictures of Sonia and her husband Robert Delaunay. This is a brooding reincarnation of their Orphism, made relevant again for a post-War generation. It is therefore a very different energy that Soulages has found in his painting, compared to that of the Delaunays: Soulages has managed to create an image that taps into elemental forces, into a Manichean struggle between the darkness and the light. Most importantly, though, Composition is an adventure in paint. The canvas bears the scars of the artist's own struggle with art, with inspiration, with his materials: this is a lexicon of techniques, a celebration of the versatility of oils, and a record of Soulages' own actions in painting it.