In Gouache 65 x 50 cm (1957), broad black forms establish a powerful cadence across the sheet, punctuated by narrow, translucent passages that appear to open between them. Rather than functioning as intervals, these lighter bands become active elements in the composition – light seems to pass through the black architecture, producing subtle shifts between opacity and transparency.

Executed in 1957, the gouache demonstrates Soulages’s continued exploration of paper as a support central to the development of his 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, had initially offered Soulages an unusually broad register, from dense opacity to translucent passages in which light could interact with the pigment and the paper beneath. The same concerns with transparency, layering and luminosity remained fundamental to his gouaches, including the present work. Soulages therefore regarded 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 aspect 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, as well as by the forthcoming catalogue raisonné dedicated to this body of work.