Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir at Timothy Taylor, London — How Black Became a Source of Light

Stand in front of a late painting by Pierre Soulages and take one step to the side. The black you were looking at shifts: a band of gloss flares white, a field of grooves turns matte and absorbent, a ridge catches the window light. Nothing in the picture has changed except you. That small, physical revelation is the heart of Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir at Timothy Taylor in London, an exhibition of nine paintings made between 2003 and 2021, on view in Mayfair from 5 November to 12 December 2026.

Q: Who was Pierre Soulages?

Born in Rodez in southern France in 1919, Soulages died in Sète in 2022 at the age of 102, having painted for more than seventy years. His first solo show came in 1949 at Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris — the same year he appeared in a group exhibition at Betty Parsons in New York, the gallery of the Abstract Expressionists. He showed at the 1952 Venice Biennale and the first Documenta in 1955, and received retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in 1967 and 2009, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and at the Hermitage. For his hundredth birthday, the Louvre gave him a survey — an honour few living artists have received. Since 2014 a museum devoted to his work has stood in Rodez.

Q: What does “Outrenoir” mean?

Soulages coined the word — literally “beyond black” — for the series he began in 1979. What interested him was not black as a colour but what a black surface does to light. In his own formulation, quoted in the gallery’s press release: “My instrument is not black… but the light reflected from the black.”

In practice, that meant working the paint like a sculptor works a surface. Soulages scraped, gouged, brushed and smeared layers of black with wide blades and homemade tools, producing passages that run from mirror-like gloss to deep, rhythmic furrows. From 2004 he used only thick impasto acrylic, which allowed the relief to stand higher and the contrasts of texture to sharpen.

Q: What will I see at Timothy Taylor?

Nine canvases spanning the last two decades of his life. Soulages titled his paintings simply by size and date, and those titles become a kind of diary. The gallery highlights several:

• Peinture 102 x 81 cm, 06 décembre 2003 — where ultramarine underlayers, a feature of the series since 1986, glow faintly through the black.
• Peinture 181 x 128 cm, 15 décembre 2016 — tapering strokes that alternate glossy and matte paint.
• A work dated 21 mai 2012 — a wavering vertical line of narrow marks running down the canvas.
• Peinture 130 x 130 cm (2021) — one of the last works, with horizontal, blade-like strokes, ridged edges and a glistening surface.

Nine works is a modest number, and that is an advantage. Outrenoir paintings need time and space; they reward slow walking and changes of angle far more than a crowded survey would allow.

Q: Where does this fit in the history of abstraction?

Soulages is often grouped with the postwar École de Paris and with American contemporaries such as Franz Kline, who also built paintings out of black. But his references went much further back. The press release points to the cave paintings of Altamira, Romanesque architecture and the Neolithic menhir statues of his native Rodez. Black, for Soulages, was the oldest colour of painting — the colour of charcoal on a cave wall — and the Outrenoir series reads as a meditation on that origin carried out with the means of late modernism.

Q: Why see it now?

Soulages is represented at MoMA, Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Centre Pompidou. A gallery exhibition of works from 2003–2021 offers London audiences a concentrated look at the phase when his method was at its most radical and refined. For painters, the lesson is practical: surface, tool and light can carry a picture without any image at all.

Timothy Taylor has long specialised in postwar and contemporary painting, and its Bolton Street gallery — just off Piccadilly — is well suited to works that depend on natural light and quiet. Combine the visit with the Royal Academy or the Mayfair galleries of Cork Street, a few minutes away.

Visiting information

Timothy Taylor, 15 Bolton Street, London W1J 8BG. 5 November – 12 December 2026; opening reception Thursday 5 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Friday 10am–6pm and Saturday 11am–5pm. Phone +44 20 7409 3344, email [email protected]. Full details are on our Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir listing and the official exhibition page. For more openings across London, Paris, Istanbul and beyond, see Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.