Pierre Soulages

Through Oct. 26 . Lévy Gorvy, 909 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-772-2004, levygorvy.com.

This December, around the time he turns 100 , the French painter Pierre Soulages will be the subject of a retrospective at the Louvre, making him the third living artist ever to show there. (The others were Picasso and Chagall.)

Working in black monochrome since the 1960s, Mr. Soulages has built an astonishing range of paintings. Dizzyingly high-concept but resolutely material , they’re consistently inventive but laser-focused on a single key insight — and if you can’t make it to Paris, you can watch this insight unfold in “Pierre Soulages: A Century” at New York’s own Lévy Gorvy Gallery. (The show also makes an extraordinary complement to the equally monochrome Vija Celmins retrospective across the street, which Roberta Smith recently called “quietly ravishing.”)

It starts with “Peinture 195 x 130 cm, 20 Novembre 1956 ,” a tall, dirty-white canvas covered in overlapping bars of black oil paint. Any one of these bars, by itself, could hold your attention as an expressive gesture. But altogether, arranged in three horizontal rows that evoke crossed-out writing, they’re too complex to parse. Instead of resting in the middle, as it normally would, your gaze is forced into the corners.