| In a great movement of collective expression that moves our contemporary art in all directions, one of the most significant facts is undoubtedly this rebirth of the fresco that some young artists, with broad views, healthy ambitions, safe trade, like Alfred Lombard, Pierre Girieud, Laffite and Dufrénoy. These days, we can see Rosenberg Gallery, the exhibition of one of them. Pierre Girieud exhibits about thirty canvases, landscapes, portraits, high compositions, where he was able to combine the purity of the drawing, the taste for order and the reasoned archaism that characterize him, the charms contained in a simmering sensitivity the ardor of a lyricism as warmly meditative as it is dreamily colored. This art, all of thought and will, is rooted in the most voluptuous sensations. The austerity that surrounds it is based on the most sensual joy and the most melancholy regrets. Behind these lines and tones, there is a heart of a man who believes that he has nothing to confess of himself but his ecstasy before the incarnated laws of the world, but that one feels oneself fighting in all these farms and sweet breasts, to look in all those deep eyes, to breathe through all those mouths where bitterness disputes it with glory and detachment with fervor. Logically, the cerebral tendencies of this art should lead to the fresco, and they brought Girieud there. Is it this stay in Siena and Italy, his long study of Lorenzetti, Giotto, Gozzoli and all the great frescoes up to Pinturrichio and Sodoma? Is it the deeply meditated reading of Cenino's treatise on painting that finally decided him? Or simply the opportunity to paint, at the Château de Pradines, this noble Nativity which adorns, with the Sermon on the on the mountain of Alfred Lombard Mountain and the Pieta of Dufrénoy, the walls of the old Romanesque chapel of Saint Pancrace? Still, Girieud has found his true way. He devotes himself, henceforth, to the fresco. Next to Alfred Lombard, he is painting, for the Faculty of Sciences of Marseilles, a huge composition of about sixty square meters, where moves a whole body of active or meditative characters in front of the sea , of the sleeping city and of the great monuments which they contemplate or finish building. (....) |