Resumen de Black flowers blossom: Bachelard, Soulages and the material imaginary of abstract painting
In mid-1948 the artist Pierre Soulages painted a singular suite of works on glass with tar. Experimenting with the particular qualities of the materials and the interplay between surface and ground, these paintings are the result of a process that was paradoxically both materialist and poetic. This essay situates the tar-on-glass paintings at a turning point in Soulages’ early practice as an abstract painter and within the specific context of a materialist discourse that closely intertwined artistic practice and philosophical thought during the 1940s in France. Gaston Bachelard’s influential theory of the material imagination is aligned with a radical field of artistic and poetic experimentation exemplified here by Soulages’ painting practice. In distinct but overlapping ways, the abstract artist and the philosopher demonstrate a commitment to a material imagination whose images are excavated by the dual imperatives of objective experience and subjective intuition
