Soulages had first made unified linear compositions in the late 1940s, realising in them the guiding principle of his art. He experimented with sonorous chiaroscuro effects throughout the 1950s and was, by 1958, creating complex, translucent colour in his works through scraping away layers of impasto, modulating his paint’s lustre and texture to create a dazzling array of effects. The present work is a magnificent example of this approach. Broad, interlocking bars of gleaming black are dragged vertically and horizontally against a shimmering field of dark grey, which itself has been pulled like a curtain over a ground of pale gold. The weighty lattice of glossy black beams creates an imposing yet delicately balanced form, reminiscent of a character of Japanese script. Its swathes of dark, lacquer-like pigment are offset by areas dragged into lyrical translucency.

This exalting of his material’s innate qualities is typical of Soulages, who makes every decision based on the painting in front of him. He paints not as a philosopher, narrator or ideologue, but as a painter. Nor, despite winning early acclaim in America during the art world’s focal shift from Paris to New York in the 1950s, is he an Abstract Expressionist. Uninterested in communicating his emotions or states of being, he does not aim to record gesture or movement in his brushstrokes. He instead arranges contrasts into a single, forceful surface that is to be apprehended in its totality. As the artist himself says, “I do not depict, I paint. I do not represent, I present”.

James Johnson Sweeney, an early champion of Soulages as director of the Guggenheim in the 1950s, wrote memorably that “a painting by Pierre Soulages is like a chord on a vast piano struck with both hands simultaneously – struck and held”. This apt simile captures the sustained, singular intensity of Soulages’ work. It is important to distinguish chord from melody: unlike the gestural sequences of Abstract Expressionism, a work like this offers no itinerary to be followed, no temporal anecdote of the artist’s feelings poured onto the canvas. Neither lyrical, personal or sentimental, it is instead a single, resonant surface of overall structural energy.