The French abstract painter Pierre Soulages, who has died aged 102, turned black into an obsession, transforming it from the absence of light into a colour in its own right. On the floor of his Left Bank studio in Paris, he produced large, shiny canvases flooded with black – or what he described as outrenoir or “beyond black”. With specially prepared brushes, palette knives and domestic implements, Soulages created complex textures, combining areas of smoothness and roughness and digging deep lines into the thick, layered paint.
For Soulages the tactile values in his paintings, as well as his related abstract bronze reliefs, were not as important as the ways in which the surfaces absorbed or reflected light. These effects were extremely attractive to collectors and the wider public alike. Although Soulages claimed to be astonished by this popularity, it is perhaps not hard to explain. Black never goes out of fashion – and no fine artist in history better understood the importance of choosing the right finish, matt or gloss.
