Musée Soulages Rodez

Geneviève Asse

Blue takes everything that passes

Curator: Malika Noui, Benoît Decron

Geneviève Asse is a painter of silence: no bass drum rolls, but a universe composed of blues and incident light, brushed in rays or flat areas. Blue Asse is elusive, difficult to place in a color chart. The canvas diffuses the light. “Inside my painting, I think there is a kind of framework. Of secret architecture, which is inside. And the paint covers, covers that too. » affirmed in 1977, Geneviève Asse to Rainer Michael Mason.

The painted work of Geneviève Asse can be disconcerting: the austere still lifes of the 1940s, the rectangular shapes, the nebulizations of white and gray on vast vertical formats and the shades of blue which gradually take over the space, divided into panels by features that we imagine to be perfect. Blurred paths, no theories, no repentance. Geneviève Asse grew up between sky and sea, in Morbihan. However, the emotion that she puts into everything separates it from reality for an informal painting of great subtlety. She does not belong to any movement: tradition is corrected by her imagination and experimentation.

The Soulages museum, in spring, reveals 60 years of creation, more than 70 works: paintings, some notebooks. Friend of writers and poets like Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Lecuire, Silvia Baron Supervielle, Claude Estezban... Geneviève Asse promises us an uncertain world where the lines meet states of blue, metamorphoses.

Musée Soulages

From 25 January 2025 to 18 May 2025
Image for Geneviève Asse
Artwork(s) loaned
  • Untitled

    Geneviève Asse (1923—2021)

    Untitled 1961
    Oil and ink on paper
    Pierre Lecuire Collection
  • Horizontal blue

    Geneviève Asse (1923—2021)

    Horizontal blue 1972
    Oil on paper
  • Light opening

    Geneviève Asse (1923—2021)

    Light opening 1973
    Oil on canvas