| To properly situate certain artists and to write them honestly, I believe that, with the works they have proposed to their contemporaries, it is necessary to consider those which are the dream of their lives, and whose circumstances, and the taste of their time, only allowed them to reveal to themselves only fragments and ambitions, thanks to a chance they only met once. Those who followed Pierre Girieud, and admired with what logic developed his talent, know him only very imperfectly, if they did not study the Adoration of the Magi painted fresco in the nartex of the Chapel of Pradines (....) If I fix this decoration of vegetation and stones because it characterizes the landscapes of Gireud and his poetic compositions embellished generally by the presence of the sea Girieud painted the Mediterranean, lovingly, like a body in a basin of rocks. He has seen it almost white and silky on some summer evenings; green; blue; traversed by currents that seem to reflect the passage of the air in this ardent light which he likes and focuses on studying magic, to modulate the games on the muscles of the flesh, the flow of water, the waves of the hair and the shapes of the clouds, as on the branches of the pines from which it flows; olive trees where it breaks; impenetrable cypress trees that surround it.
I think, writing to the Music. The attention of this extended woman makes sensitive the sounds of the instruments she listens to, and which enliven the landscape like light and shadows. How intense in the repose of this body, a real human plant produced by this calm Latin nature! And despite the science of Girieud's composition that contrasts the apparent tranquility of a nude with the movements of a group, a sea without waves, trees unvisited by the wind, the tormented blocks of hills and rocks, a feeling of exquisite spontaneity emerges from these arabesques of beings and elements. No painter is less theoretician than Girieud. (....)He believes that there are individuals who create by inner need, and others by application; that the first have an art and the second of the manner; so the changes in his production do not come from influences exercised by schools, but from the mere development of his personality. The curve is beautiful when we consider it from the early attempts to actual achievements, taking as central point Homage to Gauguin where, alongside hesitations, appear fully successful pieces that announce the landscapes, natures portraits, the Naked Beauty Praise, honor of the last autumn salon, and this still unfinished source, destined to mark Girieud's new effort towards simplicity, to assert his faith in the Latin ideal, sometimes decried . (.... ) |