Composition III 

Here is a print by Pierre Soulages, who was born in France in 1919 and passed away just last year. Soulages, often associated with Abstract Expressionism, had a career that stretched across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His work responds to the devastation wrought by World War II, engaging a period when artists began grappling with new visual vocabularies to express the unspeakable. Working in stark palettes, the artist emphasizes the materiality and texture of paint. We can consider the ways Soulages has been celebrated throughout his long career in France, in relation to how he may have responded to his position within dominant cultural narratives. In this print, the artist subverts conventional techniques through the combination of color and graphic gesture. He once said, "My instrument is not black, but the light which black reflects." The orchestration of light and shadow invites a visceral experience, as the forms seem to push and pull against one another. There is an emotional intensity here, as Soulages uses abstraction to convey something about the experience of life itself.