Pierre Soulages

If the involuntary figurative anecdote is not to be found in my painting, no doubt it is because of the importance given in it to rhythm, to that throbbing of forms in space, to that cutting up of space by time.

Time seems to me to be one of the preoccupations expressed in my painting: time seems to me to be at the center of my approach to painting, time and its relationships with space.

The artist's intentions, like the viewer's explanations, are always false keys. They approach only one side of a work, they do not even begin to penetrate the enigma it represents: A painting, like an entire work, borrows and then sheds the meanings we lend it.

I have always thought that the more limited the means, the stronger the expression: That may explain the choice of a small palette.

Because painting is an adventure into the world, it signifies the world. Because it is a synthesis, it signifies it in its totality.

If by figuration a painting introduces reciprocal relationships with the world, the painting that is not figurative introduces other relationships: For viewer and painter alike, the world is no longer looked upon, but lived, it has become part of the experience they have of it.

There is no human faith more exalting than that which draws a great deal of humble attention to what is born rather than attempting to codify the past only to invent a future just like it.

The things I found fraternal, the earth, old wood, stone, rusted iron, all of these worn things have surely left their mark on me. I have always preferred them to pure and lifeless materials.

For me, my painting has always stood apart from the figurative-verses-nonfigurative dilemma. I do not start out from either an object or a landscape, later to distort them, nor, conversely, do I seek to conjure them up in my painting.

It seems to me that what happens in a painting, which, from an object in the making, suddenly comes alive, defies description.