Pierre Soulages
Spent fifty years painting in black, and called what came off it outrenoir.
Pierre Soulages was born at Rodez in 1919 and said the prehistoric standing stones and the Romanesque abbey of Conques near his home mattered more to him than any museum. He painted almost exclusively in black from the 1940s, using walnut stain and then oil dragged across the canvas with scrapers and rubber blades. In January 1979 he covered a canvas entirely in black and found that the light reflecting off the ridged surface was the subject — he called it outrenoir, beyond black, and worked on nothing else for the next forty years. He designed the windows at Conques, and died in 2022 at a hundred and two.
The outrenoir paintings are the market and they are unusually dependent on physical condition, because what is being valued is a surface that catches light: any scratch, scuff, flattening or retouching destroys the reflection the work exists to produce, and none of it can be repaired invisibly. Lighting and hanging are part of the work. The earlier walnut-stain works on paper are a distinct and more accessible field. Soulages produced a substantial output of etchings and lithographs. The market is centred on Paris.
If you own a work by Pierre Soulages
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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