Soulages — Peintures 2013 -2015 — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 16, 2015 → January 2, 2016

Just as I was completing the updating of the fourth volume of the catalogue raisonné of Soulages’ paintings (1997-2013), I discovered not even a week ago, the nineteen new paintings of this exhibition. Dazzled! Great emotions also in the face of this striking manifestation of such creative energy. Soulages, in the midst of his tenth decade, is once again showing with stunning intrepidity, an attribute that belongs to youth: an inexhaustible vitality. This is the Golden Age of his painting.

What is most immediately striking about this set is its extraordinary diversity. In his gallery exhibitions, by contrast to museum retrospectives, Soulages has accustomed us to focus our attention on one or even two unusual ways of bringing the outrenoir to life. As though he were going to meet the “unsuspected possibilities of black” one by one. (…) There is nothing like that this year. In a kind of explosion of absolute freedom and complete spontaneity, this time Soulages simultaneously borrows a considerable number of different directions from the very heart of his outrenoir, which is the characteristic force of this exhibition, and which makes it an historic landmark: Soulages releases his creativity here without restraint, without caution or prudence!

— Pierre Encrevé, Excerpt from “l’Age d’or”