The Effect of Patches: Soulages & Bergotte

Just a quote from an interview with Soulages which reminds strikingly of the Bergotte-Vermeer passage.

"What I care about, what excites my imagination is the richness concealed in things themselves (and I mean painting too of course), their intrinsic truth and not any resemblanes or imagery they may conjure up. I remember a panel of the glass roof of the Gate de Lyon that had been mended with tar. It was just after the war, when I first arrived in Paris. I was overwhelmed by the awkward, primitive brushstrokes used by the workmen, and I think that unconsciously my first walnut stain paintings were influenced by the emotional impact of this accidental and anonymous painting.
Another time I was walking along the banks of the Seine and I noticed a ship's propeller lying on the deck of a barge. Quite suddenly, I fell in love with that propeller. I far preferred it to mathematical forms evoked for me by the sculptures I had been looking at in the Salon de Réalités Nouvelles. The propeller that was in a way similar to them, seemed to me much more rich and meaningful. I could see in it the curves of fluid dynamics, its purposes and history, its beauty as a thing, the rust, and the tar flaking off the deck.
Suddenly I remembered the patch of tar on the hospital wall that I could see from the window of the room where I did my homework as a child.
I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time, and I was fascinated by that patch of tar. It was not only an enormous splash but also the mark left by the roadmaker's brush as he tarred the street. One part of the patch was beautifully calm, smooth, and full of nobility - running quite naturally into other parts that were more uneven, so that the surface seemed to move like the waves of the sea. In outline, one side was rounded, and elsewhere there were protuberances and excrescences that were partly inexplicable and partly to be explained by the pattern of any patch of liquid splashed on a wall. Here it is the inexplicable part that interests me most.
In the propeller there were a number of things that I could feel intuitively and that yet remained incomprehensible, whereas in the mathematical forms, everything I had only guessed as to start with ended by becoming plain.
But let us go back to the patch of tar. I could see in it the viscosity, the transparency and opaqueness of the tar, the force with which it had been splashed onto the surface, and the way it had run as a result of the slope of the wall and the laws of gravity. The purely fortuitous set of circumstances had created the shape and plastic form that I found so moving. The patch had been splashed onto the wall and abandoned. I loved the uncompromising nature of the black, and the distinct outlines conditioned by the force of gravity and the texture of the stone - itself recalling the geological folds to which the tar had once belonged.
One day at noon while I was looking idly toward the other side of the street, the patch suddenly turned into a crowing rooster. The likeness was extraordinary. I could see the beak, the comb and even the feathers. Surprised and fascinated, I crossed the street. As soon as I got within a few metres of the wall, the apparition disappeared, and there was the patch again with all the wealth of a concrete object, a shape that had so satisfyingly taken on the irregularities of the wall. I was oberjoyed to rediscover everything I really loved.
A few days later the apparition returned. Once more I tried to shake it off, but all my efforts were in vain, the rooster was there with the same force and conviction as on the first day. I even had to cross the street again to get it to disappear. The rooster reappeared on a number of occasions and I even amused myself deliberately making it come and go. When I learned how Leonardo da Vinci used to stimulate his imagination by looking at old peeling walls, in search of compositions for his figures, the experience I have just described made me realize how pointless the exercise had been."


in: Bernard Ceysson: Soulages, Bergamo 1980