| Between the art of Vlaminck and that of Pierre Girieud, there is an abyss. The desires of the latter are quite different, his ambitions certainly higher. His goal is not to make a piece of painting, nor to transcribe his emotion in front of a figure or a landscape. By means of general and eternal commonplaces - Music, Dance, Apollo and Daphne, Bath of Diana - he lyrically expresses his ideal, which is akin to the family of decorators. Girieud must love the noble and calm style and order of the Chicks.
Girieud's painting is that of a contemplative, a poet. But one would have a wrong idea if one imagined this painter walking in the paths of the Dream and the Irreel. The nature in which his mythological characters move is real, it is Provence; a country which, more than any other, awakens in us many memories which bind us to the Hellenic earth. The black cypress, the greyish olive tree with its nervous trunk, the ocherous soil covered with a rare herb, the thyme hiding the ground of purple tints form the frame where the scenes chosen by Girieud take place with no other function than to provide the painter with attitudes. |