Le catafalque sans pesanteur (Original Title)

Louis Soutter made 'Le catafalque sans pesanteur' with ink, his favoured medium for its immediacy. It’s like he's drawing with black silhouettes, quickly conjuring up a scene. The ink is almost dripping off the page in places, pooling and coagulating into these strange, ghostly figures. Soutter’s economy of mark-making gets right to the heart of the matter. Look at how he’s massed those inky shapes to create a sense of claustrophobia. There’s a tension between the flatness of the shapes and the depth they suggest, like shadows in a nightmare. See that figure down in the lower left corner, bent over? It’s as if they’re bowed down by some unimaginable weight, or maybe just resigned to the gravity of it all. Soutter reminds me of Goya, both of them capturing a kind of madness, a raw nerve, but Soutter’s got this off-kilter rhythm all of his own. His work doesn't feel like a finished product, but like a glimpse into his own creative process. It's ambiguous, open to interpretation, and deeply human.