CF – So the viewer finds himself spatially immerged in a space that contradicts, or rather supplements that of Alberti’s “window”. Yours is therefore a concrete, existential space; Alberti’s is a virtual, ideal one. All things considered, as in the case of “real” and “complex” numbers, these two spaces are irreducible while also being complementary and related. Marcel Duchamp already stated that “it is the viewer who makes the work”. Each of your paintings therefore corresponds to a plural potentiality of works, declining their possibilities infinitely, in relation to the spectator. PS – This painting is “what we see when we look at it” because it changes constantly with light, our position, etc. This is why I believe in the importance of the viewer; a work truly exists in a triple relationship: the work itself, the viewer and the one who created the work. These effects are produced by the work of the black mono-pigment material whose viscosity, density have been obtained by specific tools. Sometimes I make the tools myself in a search for light, which depends on the surfaces that are produced. Some of my tools may recall those of craftsmen. And I sometimes also use craftsmen’s tools, but diverted from their customary usages. I remember using a beekeeper’s uncapping plane for years to thin a top layer of paint in
CF – Indeed, by using the prismatic properties of light and its “diffuse” reflection, you see yourself as a distant descendant of Newton and Chevreul.5 But you draw extreme consequences from this usage, leading your painting to an ontological rupture that was accomplished by neither Seurat nor Rothko despite their own genius. PS – If the light changes direction, the painting also changes. If the spectator moves, he sees another painting. There are multiple possibilities prompted by the movement of the viewer or by the light source. CF – The spectator discovers the painting little by little as he would a sculpture in the round… flat, grooved with ribs. So you abandon your paintings to their fates. Are there any cases where you no longer wish to see one of your paintings after the probationary periods that you impose on them? PS – When I no longer wish to see a painting, I burn it. In reality, I only burn it if I believe that it will come to nothing. But I recuperate the frames. The only paths that interest me are those that include precipices. In a painting, I’m wary of whatever holds no danger. CF – Some thirty years ago, here in Sète, you showed me the site of these burnings. At that time, you spoke a great deal about frames and framers, fabrication methods, and of course, formats and proportions. PS – You’re talking about that lecture at the “Image et signification”6 colloquium. The time when I said: “painting is not a language”. CF – It is not a language, but it has to do with language... PS – Its role is not to transmit a meaning. CF – Your desire to extricate meaning does not date from yesterday. You have also previously refused comparison of your painting to calligraphy. PS – Some calligraphies are also illegible. When we went to Japan for the first time, in 1958, some Japanese calligraphers organised
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1 This interview was first published in French in the magazine Noto: “Bonjour, monsieur Soulages” (Noto, n°5, Paris, 2016, p. 23-29). Our grateful thanks to Noto’s director Alexandre Curnier for granting permission for the interview to be republished, here reedited and translated into English.
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2 “The public constantly asks for newness… So what does newness look like? It’s as old as the world, newness.” Jacques Prévert, a line from the film Les Enfants du paradis (1945).
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3 Pierre Soulages showed his monopigment paintings at the Centre GeorgesPompidou in 1979.
4
| Joël Chevrier, “Les
outrenoirs de Pierre Soulages, obsession d’un physicien?”, <www. echosciences-grenoble. fr>, April 11 2014.
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Cf. Claude Frontisi, “La lumière au figure. La peinture selon Eugène Chevreul”, in Raison présente “Les lumières et les hommes”, n°196, Courville sur Eure, Union rationaliste, 2015. 5
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6 Cf. Image et signification, acts of the colloquium, Paris, La documentation Française, 1983.
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| fabricate (fabric of) art n°2 |
PS (continuing his reading) – “But beyond this technical difficulty in reproduction, there is the encounter between the artist’s vision and scientific description. Considering the light in the space in front of the painting as the work’s material is an artistic intuition that matches scientific description of light based on the electromagnetic field in empty space.” As far as I go, I’ve always said that the material with which I work is not the black but the light that it emits towards the viewer. As a result, the painting’s space includes the space in front of it, and the viewer standing in front of it is within the space of the painting. This is what this researcher thought and wrote without knowing me, following his way of thinking, using his physicist’s vocabulary.
order to reveal the layer below.
fabrique de l’art
are reproduced, detail by detail, in 3D, with the help of the most sophisticated techniques: Altamira, Chauvet, the future Lascaux 4. But as far as you go, the concerns are not the same because they are deliberately visual.