Peinture 130 x 165 cm, 1 septembre 2019

Acrylic on canvas
51 3/16 x 64 15/16 inches (130 x 165 cm)
© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

I was in Sète, near the studio, on the terrace facing a broad, empty horizon. The sun became a black disc, blacker than the sky, even darker for being surrounded by the most intense fringe of light. Everyone was looking up, fascinated. There was a deep silence. The birds stopped flying and singing. It was a grand cosmic spectacle. The immensity of this spectacle brought home the insignificance of our lives. And this eclipse was but a tiny event concerning a small planet, our sun, a little star lost in the gigantic multiplicity of stars in a galaxy that is itself lost in a cluster of galaxies. The obscured sun was black, the black that came before light, before colors. The black that I love, with its gravity, its radicalism. There was something in this of the origins of the world, of our own origins, too, before we were born, before ‘we saw the light of day.’ Is it for these reasons hidden deep within us that, ever since the most distant origins of painting, for hundreds of centuries, for over three hundred centuries, men have gone to the darkest parts of the earth to paint, into the absolute darkness of caves, and to paint with black?

—Pierre Soulages in “Un spectacle cosmique grandiose,” Écrits et propos, 2007