Pierre Soulages Quotes

It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for.

A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite - it should look inside of us. When I put them in the middle of the room, I attach the paintings at the top to the ceiling and on the bottom to the floor. I prefer this to just hanging them from the ceiling because it creates a place in a space, like a wall.

Painting allows us to live in a more interesting way than we live our everyday lives.

I am against limitations like perspective. Perspective is illusion, it's the opposite of presence, and art is presence.

Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care.

At 16, I decided to do something brave: I went on a prehistoric dig. In fact, I've had my name in a museum since I was 18 years old, not for my painting but for the prehistoric objects I found. That's how I started thinking about art.

Painting is a play of opacities and transparencies.

It's fascinating to think that as soon as man came into existence, he started painting.

For me, it's important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That's the purpose of a painting and of art in general.

I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.

I always loved to paint. As a kid, I liked to dip my paintbrush in black ink. They gave colors to me to use, but I didn't like them very much.

Black ink was always my favorite. I loved it. And then one day I realized that the only thing I ever wanted to do was to paint.

I realized that most people waste their lives earning a living, and I wanted to live. I love painting, so I keep painting. That's how I became an artist.