Den franske maler Pierre Soulages fortæller om sine sorte malerier:


"STILLPASS: You’ve painted with black from the beginning, but how did you get “beyond black” for in your Outrenoir series?

SOULAGES: One day in 1979, I was here in this studio working on a painting for hours and there was black paint everywhere. I was exhausted, and I couldn’t understand why I had worked for so long on something I didn’t like. I thought it must be a bad painting because it wasn’t turning out like the others. I went to sleep for an hour, and when I woke up and looked at it again, I thought, “I don’t paint with black anymore. I paint with the light reflected off the black surface.” This realization touched me, so I continued to make more of these paintings. The Centre Pompidou invited me to do an exhibition of this new series, which people started calling noir lumière, or “black light.” I didn’t like this name because it suggests an optical effect. I made these because I found that the light reflected by the black surface elicits certain emotions in me. These aren’t monochromes. The fact that light can come from the color which is supposedly the absence of light is already quite moving, and it is interesting to see how this happens. I realized I needed to find a word that could convey the mental field opened up by these paintings. That is when I invented the word outrenoir. Outrenoir doesn’t exist in English; the closest is “beyond black.” In French, you say “outre-Manche,” “beyond the Channel,” to mean England or “outre-Rhin,” “beyond the Rhine,” to mean Germany. In other words, “beyond black” is a different country from black."


Se også
Pierre Soulages: 95-årig Superstar