TEHRAN (IBNA) -- ‘Pierre’ (2019), a book by French author and poet Christian Bobin a poetic account of his encounter with the painter, printmaker, and sculptor Pierre Soulages has been published in Persian.
This book has been translated into Persian by Somayeh Sabzevar Shari’ati and Mojdeh Ebrahim Nattaj under the title, ‘Little Darkness for Better Seeing’ in 71 pages.
An excerpt from the book quotes Soulages as saying: “I don’t care about painting. I don’t care about music. I don’t care about poetry. I don’t care about everything that belongs to a genre and slowly withers in this belonging.
It took me more than sixty years to know what I was looking for when writing, reading, falling in love, stopping short in front of a bindweed, a snail or a setting sun. I seek this presence and feeling which crossed the hells before reaching us to fill us by killing us.”
Soulages is known as “the painter of black”, owing to his interest in the color “both as a color and a non-color. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens a mental field all its own.” He saw light as a work material; striations of the black surface of his paintings enable him to reflect light, allowing the black to come out of darkness and into brightness, thus becoming a luminous color.
Bobin received the 1993 Prix des Deux Magots for the book ‘Le Très-Bas’ (translated into English in 1997 by Michael Kohn and published under two titles: The Secret of Francis of Assisi: A Meditation and The Very Lowly).