NOIRoeS project: Total study of the historical and technical background of Soulages' paintings to define the conservation strategy Projet NOIRoeS : Étude holistique des contextes historique et technique des peintures de Soulages pour définir une stratégie de conservation-restauration En Fr

Résumé En

Over 15 years of restoration practice, a hundred paintings by Pierre Soulages have been observed, among which paintings dating from the late 1950s show variable conservation patterns: some paintings are in very good condition, some others require frequent treatments to allow their display, whereas a few paintings are in a very worrying and poor condition. Collaborations with conservators and analysis were carried out, but this was not enough to ensure a stabilisation of the works : the paintings are today confined to storage rooms or restoration studios without any perennial treatment allowing their stabilization. With the aim of proposing more appropriate conservation protocols, the PhD-led-practice project NOIRœS* aims to establish an interdisciplinary methodology to better understand the factor at play in the degradation of paintings dating from the 1958-1960 period. The NOIRœS project relies on two main axes: a first one consists on developing novel imaging probes at the macro and microscale to extract physico-chemical evidences informative on the alteration processes at stake, and also provide new signatures of early stages of alteration, that can be used in a preventive conservation approach. The second one, which is described in our communication, focuses on the aggregation and the structuration of heterogeneous historical information of the corpus of paintings, to better encompass how their “social life” and their materiality have affected their evolution through time (materials, context of production, studio conditions, history of loans and collectors, etc.). The first steps of the work consisted in aggregating and structuring very heterogeneous historical information about artist’s practice, such as technical information on the materials choice and use, the succession of ownerships, storage period and loans for each painting, the past restoration interventions. An information system was developed, backed by a database, to structure the data to ensure its exploitation, both directly through the implementation of intelligible data representation and through the implementation of APIs (Application Programming Interface) allowing for the automated exploitation of data. The "theoretical design" of this information system was the subject of a master's degree course, entitled Base-NOIRœS, which aimed first of all to establish precisely the typologies of data to be included in the information system, to propose a database structure suitable for organizing this information, and then, covering part of the model, to implement an interface for entering and exploiting the data.The last step consisted in feeding the database in order to evaluate correlations between heterogeneous information on the history and materiality with the actual state of conservation of the paintings of the corpus, to study a variety of parameters such as the choices of materials, the influence of the drying condition, the impact of the travel for exhibitions versus the stable locations, the frequent change of collection/ownership, the specific conditions in storage, the exhibition, and/or restoration treatments that could explain the bad or good condition of the works.