Paris (AFP)

Pure black, he managed to bring out the light. Uncompromising creator, Pierre Soulages, the greatest living French painter, continues to explore the mysteries of this pigment and to paint ... just a few days before his centenary.

"I like the authority of black, its gravity, its obviousness, its radicality (...) Black has unsuspected possibilities," says the artist, one of the few to have the honor of the Louvre in his lifetime. "It's a very active color, we put black next to a dark color and it lights up," he said in an interview with AFP.

Tall, always dressed in black, Soulages never cut the link with his native soil, the Aveyron, while painting elsewhere. He is a man of fidelity, to himself, to the landscapes of his childhood, to the great plateaux, to his artistic quest for light.

For more than 75 years, he has tirelessly drawn his path, attracting recognition of cultural institutions and the art market that has made him one of the most active French artists.

At the approach of his exhibition at the Louvre, one of his paintings of 1960 was awarded 9.6 million euros in Paris, a world record. The previous record was 9.2 million for a 1959 painting, sold just a year ago in New York.

"It just means that there are wealthy people who can acquire works," he swept recently, interviewed by a reporter from Le Monde.

- Museum in Rodez -

In May 2014 - when he was 94 years old - he had the rare privilege of attending the inauguration in Rodez, his hometown, of a museum entirely dedicated to his work.

Soulages was born on December 24, 1919 in a modest house of the early nineteenth century. His father, a bodybuilder, died when he was only five years old. He is raised by his mother who runs a fishing and hunting store.

Very early, Soulages disdains "the pretty colors of watercolor" and ink-painted trees in winter, bare branches, effects of snow.

During a school visit to the abbey Sainte-Foy Conques, nearby, the teenager has a revelation to the beauty of this Romanesque church: he will be a painter.

Pierre Soulages is admitted to the Beaux-Arts in Paris on the eve of the Second World War. But he dries up classes, preferring to train in Montpellier. In 1941, he met Colette Llaurens, whom he married a year later, with false documents to escape from the Obligatory Labor Service (STO), which forced young Frenchmen to work for Germany.

Pierre and Colette are almost always together.

In 1947, the young painter moved to Paris where he was noticed by Francis Picabia who encouraged him, as well as Fernand Léger. Abstract painting is popular. But she is red, yellow, blue. Soulages him, chooses to work with humble walnut, used to tint the wood, and brushes of painter in building.

In the 1950s, his paintings entered the most prestigious museums in the world such as the Guggenheim in New York or the Tate Gallery in London. He meets the main representatives of the New York School, including Mark Rothko who becomes his friend.

- One hundred stained glass windows -

The large paintings from the 1950s to the 1970s bear witness to the painter's work on chiaroscuro. Black asserts itself in a relation to other colors such as red or blue, thanks to the technique of scraping.

In 1959, Soulages was built a house-workshop on the heights of Sète (south), facing the Mediterranean, where he still lives. He also has two workshops in Paris.

The artist, who prefers to work flat, switches to "outrénoir" in 1979: while he is struggling on a work entirely covered with a thick black, Soulages realizes that he has just crossed a course in streaking.

"I was beyond the dark, in another mental field," he said. "The pot with which I paint is black, but it is the light, diffused by reflections, that matters".

In 1986, the State commissioned more than 100 stained glass windows for the abbey church of Conques. They are inaugurated in 1994.

The painter's fame continues to grow. At the end of 2009, his big retrospective at the Pompidou Center attracted half a million visitors.

© 2019 AFP