Soulages at the Luxembourg Museum
This autumn, the Musée du Luxembourg is celebrating Pierre Soulages with an exhibition entitled ‘Soulages, Another Light.’ The artist, who passed away in 2022, remains an essential figure of modern art, renowned worldwide for his work on black and light.
The exhibition traces the evolution of his work, from his early experiments to the vast Outrenoir canvases that brought him renown. Faced with these black surfaces—striated, polished, sculpted—one understands that black is never an absence of color, but rather a vibrant space where light reflects, diffracts, and transforms with the viewer’s gaze. Each step before a canvas alters its perception: what seems fixed becomes movement, what appears dark becomes illuminated.
Through a selection of major paintings, the exhibition highlights the radical vision and consistency of an artist who made black his unique language, and light his ally. Soulages invented a form of painting that does not simply offer itself to be seen: it demands presence, attention, and openness from the viewer.
One leaves the exhibition with the sense of having experienced a living painting, one that continually reinvents itself before our eyes. More than a tribute, ‘Soulages, Another Light’ reveals the undiminished power of a body of work that continues to transform our way of seeing. Here, black is not darkness, but a promise: that of a clarity always waiting to be discovered.