In Gouache 65 x 50 cm (1952), translucent washes and emphatic strokes in black now interrupt, now partially reveal the blue-grey passages beneath, creating a dynamic cadence of lines in the pictorial space.

Executed in 1952, the work is an early example of Soulages’ paintings on paper, a medium through which he first coalesced his iconic pictorial language. Distancing himself from the neo-Fauvist figurative works of the early 1940s, from 1947 he turned to walnut stain, gouache and paper, drawn to the immediacy these materials afforded. As the artist later recalled, “I felt constrained by oil […] One day, in a burst of impatience and temper, I grabbed some walnut stain and some housepainter’s brushes and unleashed myself on paper.”

Walnut stain, an everyday material more commonly associated with furniture, offered an unusually broad register, from dense opacity to translucent passages in which light seems to enter the pigment itself. These investigations into transparency, layering and luminosity remained fundamental to Soulages’s work. The artist therefore considered paintings on paper as autonomous works in their own right; as Pierre Encrevé, the art historian and author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné noted, “For Soulages, there has never been a hierarchy between works on canvas and works on paper.” The importance of this part of his practice has recently been foregrounded by the major exhibition devoted to his works on paper at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2025–26, alongside the forthcoming catalogue raisonné dedicated to this body of work.