The Groove 177 - Why Less Can Be More
WHY LESS CAN BE MORE
Embracing simplicity in your thinking is not a mere reduction of complexity; rather, it is a deliberate choice to distill the essence, allowing clarity and elegance to take center stage.
Whether navigating business strategies, creative endeavors, or problem-solving, the power of simplicity lies in its ability to illuminate the most effective path forward. It encourages a focus on what truly matters, allowing for streamlined decision-making and innovative solutions. In any profession, cultivating a mindset that values simplicity becomes a potent tool, enabling you to cut through the clutter, adapt with agility, and harness straightforward answers.
Pierre Soulages, born in Rodez, France in 1919, became a luminary in the realm of abstract art by narrowing down his vast body of work of more than 1700 paintings to the use of one color: black. As I looked back to his extraordinary 102 years of life and a career that spanned more than seven decades, I discovered three of his most consistent ways of thinking:
The Power of Restraint
Pierre Soulages in the hall dedicated to his masterpieces in the Museum Fabre in Montpellier, France, February 2007. Abaca Press / Alamy Stock Photo.
How many people (including myself) have fallen into the trap of needlessly complicating matters? In our quest for solutions to problems, we often err by overanalyzing and introducing unnecessary complexities, deviating from the core issues.
Pierre Soulages is to black what Yves Klein is to blue. At the center of his philosophy is his fascination with the color black, making all his work revolve around it. Unlike traditional perceptions that associate black with absence, Soulages saw it as a rich and dynamic hue capable of conveying depth and intensity.
"My canvas isn't black; it's the radiance born from black." Coining the term 'Outrenoir' (Beyond Black), he conjured paintings celebrated for their boundless black expanses, meticulously crafted by manipulating light to dance on the paintings’ richly textured surfaces. Inventing 'Outrenoir' to encapsulate his unique process, Soulages elegantly defined it as a realm beyond black, a concept absent in English, but aptly described in French.
Soulages' minimalist aesthetic also teaches us the value of restraint. By stripping away excess and focusing on essential elements, you too can distill your creative expressions to their purest forms, allowing for greater clarity and resonance.
Steve Jobs repeated hundreds of times that one of his design mantras was: "Focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."
Let Things Speak for Themselves
Pierre Soulages’s, Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 4 août 1961, oil on canvas, 1961, sold at Sotheby’s in November 2021 for $20,141,700.
When a product is well-made or a piece of art contains no more than what it needs, words are superfluous. Imagine if you were to create something where you don’t need to offer lengthy explanations all the time. I know, it sounds utopian in our mega-convoluted modern world, where intricacy has become our default mode.
For this reason, none of Soulages’ paintings bear a title, each one identified merely by its dimensions and the date of execution. For him, "a painting is an organization, a set of relationships between shapes, lines and colored surfaces, on which the meanings which we give it are made and undone."
In a quest for a state of harmony and alignment, the Tao Te Ching, written approximately 400 years BC by Lao Tzu, beautifully unravels the essence of Tao, portraying it as the unseen yet omnipresent source and the very ideal from which all existence springs. This force, both immensely powerful and supremely humble, serves as the profound root of all things. In the eloquent silence of his creations, Soulages’ art embodies a profound truth - a truth found in the absence of words. It's as if, within the strokes of his paintings, we discern an echo reminiscent of the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu.
Seeing Beyond Limitations
A view of the Soulages museum on June 25, 2023 in Rodez, France. Abaca Press / Alamy Stock Photo.
When you have trained your mind and eye to think and see the essential, limitations also fade away.
The wonderful thing about a Pierre Soulages paintings is that you have to be in front of one of them to see it and feel it beyond the limitation of black color. "Some mornings, it is a silvery gray," he told the critic Bernard Ceysson in 1979. "Sometimes, capturing the light reflected from the sea, it is blue. At other times it can be tinged a coppery brown. In fact, it always corresponds to the light that falls on it. One day, I even saw it green: There had been a storm, and there was a blaze of sun on the trees not far away."
The Outrenoir paintings and their precursors, where other colors like yellow and red had been included secondary to the perennial black, were radical departures from the art that was being produced in France in the 1940s when Soulages started his career. Breaking all these rules placed an enormous amount of attention on him, and shortly after he was having exhibitions in Europe and in the United States.
Part of his rebellion was showing that art history was older than the canons imposed by Greco-Roman traditions or the Renaissance, and instead he focused on looking at prehistoric art. Black had been an obsession with artists since the dawn of humanity, he said. "Why did people in prehistoric times draw in black inside dark black caves when they could've used chalk?"
Soulages went on to have one of the longest and most successful careers recorded in art history. In a triumphant moment for contemporary art, the Pompidou Center hosted his staggering retrospective in 2009, drawing a colossal crowd of over 500,000 visitors - the grandest showcase the museum has ever dedicated to a living artist. In 2019, the Louvre commemorated his 100th birthday with a show of 20 paintings made between 1946 and 2019. This prestigious honor placed Soulages in the rare company of Picasso and Chagall, the only other artists bestowed with such distinguished shows at the Louvre during their lifetimes.
Seeing beyond any limitations allowed Soulages to clarify his way of thinking and translate it into his work: “Painting allows us to live in a more interesting way than we live our everyday lives. If painting doesn't offer a way to dream and create emotions, then it's not worth it.”
Then he added: “Painting isn't just pretty or pleasant; it is something that helps you to stand alone and face yourself. For me, it's important to experience this 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.”
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