Since October 14th, 2009 and until March 8th, 2010 takes place, in the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, an important review of the contemporary painter Pierre Soulages, with hundred works from 1946 until now. 
During this exhibition, the Georges Pompidou Center organizes, in association with the National History Art Institute (INHA), an international colloquium around the work of this painter on January 21st and 22nd, 2010.
Since 1979, Pierre Soulages uses almost exclusively the black colour, called "black-light" and he calls himself "outrenoir". The structure of the work is constituted by the texture of the pictorial material, by the opposition between smooth parts and streaked parts, or by contrast between the thickness of some surfaces and the tension of the lines which cross them. According to the position of the spectator, the picture is recreated differently according to the way the surface reflects the light. So, from the only black pigment Soulages realizes a work on the light.

In the last works, a more violent light comes from white colour and the contrast with black colours.

Pierre Soulages was born in 1919 in Rodez, nearby Conches and the abbey church Sainte-Foy, of which he conceived stained-glasses (104 stained-glasses which he realized from 1987 to 1994). He lives and works in Paris and in Sète. All over the world museums dedicated him important exposures.

Some comments of Pierre Soulages:

"Too often the public is interested in the works by the spectacular side of the character. When it is about an artist or about a writer, we speak about the man to try to open eyes on a work. I was often struck by the excesses or by the journalistic side of biographies, studies. But even when we speak about a work really, more seriously, we report it never completely, even by an explanation which seems functional. The explanation never replaces the work. A painting can be at the origin of a magnificent literary text, but you should not forget that at this moment, the work is only pretext. …… .It is then necessary to judge the text independently of its pretext……."
………The reality of a work is the triple relationship between the thing that it is …………… the one who look at,………. and the one who made it, because it is not anything, it is a thing made by a (wo)man and it is the product of decisions, strategies, risks and chances. A triple relationship between the artist who made it, the thing that it is, and the one who looks at. .......... When we write about an art work the text is writted by an individual and at a certain point. In 1880 or in 1950, we did not write the same thing about the Egyptian art. ………. but nevertheless it is the same …….. I want to speak about the modification of glance on the same work from a period to another…………"