In the oeuvre of Pierre Soulages, influences from American artists such as Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell are combined with inspirations from Asian calligraphy. From 1979, after an accidental occurrence in the studio when black paint spilled over the canvas of a painting, his color palette, which had always been limited, was predominantly reduced to black. In this completely black overlay, Soulage found reflections, structures and differentiations, even luminosity, which he describes as "outrenoir". With the term "outrenoir", Pierre Soulage formulates a denomination for the result of his personal confrontation with black. He shapes the black matter with wide spatulas, brushes, squeegees and blades, depending on the effect he wants to achieve, the light he wants to appear in the surface reflection of the black. In the resulting exclusively black paintings, the reflex lines moving in different directions determine the reduced and yet extremely interesting color effect. At the beginning of the 1980s, a renewed interest in expanding the range came up. In addition to blue, white (e.g. Encrevé 815) and a light to reddish brown (e.g. Encrevé 816) also began to appear.

Our painting dates from this period, when the palette brightened up again for a short time. The direction of movement and color is no longer shaped so strongly by obvious surface structures, but rather by color bars with irregular outlines. Here three black, multi-layered stripes over white and a narrow, light stripe of ochre in the lower margin of the picture. Pierre Soulage deals with the color and light effects of black in relation to white and ocher. The thinly applied and finely superimposed areas of black prove to be reliefed gradations in their margins. In oblique light, the surface transforms into a fine relief of regular, vertically rhythmic structures. Each of the superimposed thin black layers of paint has a slightly different structure and so the characterizations underneath can often only be seen in the margins of deeper layers. Pierre Soulage has not given up his basic idea of "outrenoir" in this delicate and calm painting. Rather, it is complemented here with the bright, radiant white and the creamy light ocher to form a new harmonization.
His works can be found in the Tate Gallery, London, the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA, New York, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, as well as in leading museums in Africa and Asia. [EH]