Throughout his career, Pierre Soulages pursued a technical and formal quest centered around the singularity of black to express its "authority, gravity, clarity, and radicalness." This journey began in the 1940s with his initial experiments using walnut stain, a wood dye that allowed him to explore the intensity, warmth, and transparencies of black. Innovative, these walnut stain works on paper stood out in the post-war artistic landscape. Two decades later, he revisited this medium, using an acrylic-vinyl emulsion mixed with colored powders. This new approach granted walnut stain the stability and durability that had long been sought, marking a peak in the artist's creations of this kind during his career. Acquired directly from the artist by Dr. Jean-Paul Lévy and remaining in his collection to this day, our work "Painting (gouache) on paper 65 x 50 cm, 1973" belongs to this highly sought-after series of walnut stain works from the 1970s. Exceptional in its rarity and the quality of its composition, this piece consists of vertically standing forms, horizontally streaked by thick brushstrokes, skillfully playing with transparencies in the pictorial material.
Here the walnut stain occupies space, saturating it, imposing monumental verticality, impressing with its sharpness and the quality of its lines. These walnut stain graphics were often mistakenly considered as ideograms or signs; however, it is not the motif that interests Soulages, but rather the interaction of the clear paper left in reserve with the dark walnut stain. It is not the color black that truly motivates him but the emergence of light. The poetic force of creation, which has been present since the 1940s, remains true to the definition that Soulages already gave in the catalog of the 1948 German exhibition "Französische abstrakte Malerei" for which he had created the poster: "A painting is an organization, a set of relationships between forms (lines, colored surfaces) on which the meanings attributed to it come and go."