| At the Druet gallery, we are pleased to find Provence painted by a Provençal man, Pierre Girieud. This artist who started with a large canvas: "The Temptation of Saint Anthony", where he proved to be passionate about colors, shimmering, decor, orientalism, seemed predestined to travel to Egypt and Syria like his Mediterranean predecessors Loubon, Barry, Dufeu. But it is in his Provence alone that he travels. He does this every year with a singularly sympathetic love, because there is as much instinctive attachment as classical scholarship. A fervent admirer of Italian landscapes, such as they are engraved in the background of paintings by primitives and Renaissance masters, he was enthusiastic about finding sites between the Rhone, Durance and the Alps, which could have been, by their grandeur and their purity, to frame scenes from mythology as well as from the gospel, from the “Judgment of Paris” as from the “Nativities”. This time Girieud discovers a sort of Provence whose nature seems feudal to us, the alpine villages which, like stairs, lean against the foothills of the crenellated mountains like the most romantic dungeons. What first explodes here is a science of drawing which, by the force and delicacy of its probity, reaches the prestige of engraving: these fields of olive trees, arranged in front of glistening meadows, these villages like mosaics in the very mass of the rocks, these sharp peaks like peaks, these valleys where the mountains seem to repeat themselves endlessly like the echo of each other, these striking, perspectives of stone, lights, azure, are established with masterful security which dispenses the calm joy of what will last.
To achieve this impression of solidity, here is a color which, as much by its freshness as by its richness, seems to be enamel, a joyful enamel where forever smells the fire of the sun which bakes and shines it every day: greens, blue, orange palpitate in their fiery crudity of lava.
An admirable portrait of the painter by himself, dedicated to his friend from the start, artist Francisco Durio, crowns this cheerful celebration of nature: Girieud engraved with moving power his simple but strong will to say until last and as best he can, what he loves most deeply. The light which shapes this high forehead and illuminates this face to the soul, we know it: it is that of serenity which, alone, provides men with work nourished by nature. |