Pierre Soulages: Paintings on Paper at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Lévy Gorvy Dayan has filled its second-floor galleries at 19 East 64th Street with works on paper by the French painter Pierre Soulages (1919–2022). More than twenty pieces are on view through October 24, and most have never been exhibited. The show was organized with the artist's widow, Colette Soulages, and is the sixth Soulages solo presentation by Dominique Lévy, who has worked with the artist and his estate for decades.

Soulages is called "the painter of black and light." From the postwar years he worked largely in black, and from 1979 until his death he pursued Outrenoir, or "beyond black," a series of scraped and slicked, tar-like surfaces. In 2019, for his centennial, the Louvre mounted a survey of his career. He was only the third living artist to receive a retrospective there, after Picasso and Chagall. He also received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 1992.

Paper was where it began. It was his first support, and in 1947 he turned to walnut stain, a material craftsmen use to dye wood, applied with housepainter's brushes. Diluted or concentrated, it ran from brown to black and built layers of transparency and opacity as the paper absorbed it. Soulages later said oil paint had felt confining. He went on to use ink and gouache, treating the white of the paper as a compositional element, and he made his own tools, including scrapers, blades and sponges.

The paper works are not studies for canvases. Pierre Encrevé, author of the catalogue raisonné, writes that Soulages saw no hierarchy between canvas and paper. Working without a stretcher to wait for, and on a surface that allows no correction, he could make fast decisions. He continued exploring light on paper until 2004.

The checklist runs from a 1963 ink work through gouache pieces of 1977–78, gouache-and-graphite works of 1999–2000, and walnut stain and ink works of 1999–2004. Most are roughly 75 or 108 centimeters tall. Interest in his paper work has grown: more than one hundred works were donated to the Musée Soulages in Rodez in 2014, the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris held a large exhibition in 2025–26, and a catalogue raisonné of the paper works is forthcoming.