Timothy Taylor presents Outrenoir, an exhibition of late paintings by Pierre Soulages (1919–2022). The exhibition features nine luminous monochromes from the artist’s iconic Outrenoir series, spanning 2003 to 2021, the year before his death at the age of 102.
For more than seven decades, Soulages dedicated his practice to exploring the depths of the colour black and interplay between pictorial and environmental light. Inspired by the Palaeolithic paintings in the Altamira cave in Spain, Romanesque architecture, and the Neolithic menhir statues housed in the Musée Fenaille in his hometown of Rodez, France, he began his career in the late 1940s with dark, graphic abstractions that explored the format and materiality of his medium. In 1979, he initiated the series Outrenoir–a neologism that means beyond or across black–which he would develop for the rest of his life. Layering black paint on canvas, Soulages scraped, gouged, brushed, and smeared the surface to produce textures ranging from smooth, glossy expanses to deeply grooved ridges.