Geneviève Asse (1923-2021) is a painter of silence: no bass drum rolls, but a universe of blues and incidental light, brushed in grapes or solids. Bleu Asse is elusive, difficult to classify in a color chart. The canvas diffuses light.

"Inside my painting, I think there's a kind of framework. A secret architecture that's inside. And the paint covers that too." said Geneviève Asse to Rainer Michael Mason in 1977.

Geneviève Asse's paintings can be disconcerting: the austere still lifes of the 40s, the rectangular shapes, the nebulizations of whites and grays on vast vertical formats and the shades of blue that gradually take over the space, divided into panels by strokes that we imagine to be perfect. Scrambled paths, no theories, no repentance.

Geneviève Asse grew up between sea and sky, in Morbihan. Yet the emotion she brings to everything separates her from reality to create an informal painting of great subtlety. She belongs to no movement: tradition is corrected by her imagination and experimentation.

This spring, the Musée Soulages unveils 60 years of creative work, including over 70 paintings and a few notebooks. A friend of writers and poets such as Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Lecuire, Silvia Baron Supervielle, Claude Estezban... Geneviève Asse promises us an uncertain world, where lines embrace states of blue and metamorphosis.

Benoît Decron, Chief Curator, Director of the Soulages Museum.