Five new works by Pierre Soulages, the immense Aveyron painter who died at the end of October, were presented this Thursday at the Rodez museum of the same name.
The story and the subject. For its new temporary exhibition, the Soulages museum reserves its temporary exhibition hall to present the work of Catalan architects RCR, winners of the Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in architecture, in 2017.
Through this retrospective, the museum therefore wishes to “pay homage to their singular history”, closely linked to this environment which now houses the works of Pierre Soulages. Ramon Vilalta, Carme Pigem and Rafael Aranda, the three architects of the studio, were therefore present on Thursday morning, to discuss their work related to their territory, the Garrotxa, in northern Catalonia, at the foot of the Pyrenees.
At the same time, the Soulages museum received five new works. Five warehouses that span from 1951, the era of Pierre Soulages’ first international successes, to 1991, the era of the ever larger and more impressive “Outrenoir”. There are three paintings on canvas and two on paper. The most notable work is the polyptych, created in 1982, and deposited in the museum by the Orange group.
Deposits of at least three years
While the tributes to Pierre Soulages will multiply from the beginning of next year, in France and abroad, Benoît Decron, chief curator of the museum, insisted “it starts here, in Rodez”. Deposits that will remain for a minimum of three years. The most significant, according to Benoît Decron, remains the one commissioned for the Dijon telecommunications center, on the advice of Serge Lemoine, an art historian. “I had noticed this painting hanging in the headquarters of the Orange group in Paris in 2013. Its originality lies in its five contiguous panels reproducing an alternation of Outrenoir-type paintings and barred paintings with colored bands,” says the curator. of the museum.
As a symbol of an institution in constant evolution, this retrospective of the work of Catalan architects, associated with the hanging of these five new canvases, allows us to offer another look at the work of Pierre Soulages and to complete the understanding that can be gained from his Work.
