“One day of January 1979, I was painting and black had invaded the entire surface of the canvas, with no shapes, no contrasts, no transparency. In this extreme I saw, in a way, the negation of black. The differences in texture reflect the light to a greater or lesser extent, and from the darkness emanates a clarity, a pictorial light whose particular emotional power drove my desire to paint - I like this violent colour to encourage interiorisation. My instrument was no longer black but this secret light coming from black. Its effects are all the more intense because it emanates from the greatest absence of light.” (P. Soulages) Soulages’ radical exploration of black as both medium and subject led to a profound shift in his artistic vocabulary. No longer a mere colour, black became the very site of light’s emergence, a paradox in which darkness revealed its own luminosity through variations in texture and reflection. This revelation necessitated a redefinition - one that transcended the limitations of conventional chromatic language : “The word used to describe a colour does not convey what it really is. It ignores the brightness or mattness, the transparency or opacity, the state of the surface - smooth, streaked, rough... and also the rounded angular shape... it hides its dimensions and quantity from us. My paintings were first called black light, referring to a type of light that is inseparable from the black that underlies it. In order not to limit them to an optical phenomenon, I coined the word “Outrenoir”, meaning beyond black, a light transmuted by black, and, just as “outre-Rhin” and “outre-Manche” refer to another country, “Outrenoir” also refers to another country, another mental field than that of simple black.“

Soulages’ decision to title his works solely by their dimensions and date reflects a deliberate assertion of painting’s material autonomy, aligning with the modernist preoccupation with medium specificity. By omitting descriptive or thematic titles, he reinforces the fundamental nature of his work as an object—paint on canvas—rejecting external narratives that might impose figurative or symbolic readings. This approach situates his practice within a lineage of abstraction that prioritises the physicality of the artwork itself, emphasising its existence as a self-sufficient entity rather than a representation of something beyond its own structure.