| Pierre Girieud's work is one that, by their size, cannot be studied in a few pages. It is too well known for a rapid history to impose itself, but we thought that at the moment when the young Painting asserted itself towards the Style, it would be useful to specify which spiritual guide offers us the effort of this beautiful painter.
I cannot think of Girieud without evoking him in front of the wall, painting with fresco in the silence of fertile solitudes, so much seems to me imposing the enthusiasm of a thought contained behind this meditative front. And this in contrast to these hurried times, boastful and without ideal, where so many ingenuous talent have carved souls in the uniform of a sportman. (...) Girieud therefore set out resolutely, singing an old song from our fathers and over the shoulder of the crumblers of the Sun, joined the Sienese of the 15th century in their pure Italy. (...) Girieud who undergoes his time with intelligence, Girieud who phones, takes the railroad and the car, has refused to the wonders of a concert by TSF, to the pleasure of painting a packet of gray tobacco against a background of factories. He did not taste the easel painting reduced to extreme plastic purity, to that bad literary sauce drowned in metaphysics; he moved away from the renovating current of a pseudo-decoration reduced to ornamental writing and deprived of plastic meaning in depth. (...) He decidedly returned to the beneficial torture of analysis, struggling, seeking, gradually asserting himself master of the forms that Nature, like the pages of a huge dictionary, offered to his appetite for knowledge. They will no longer be, as with most, happy indications where a few colored tasks pleasantly support amorphous silhouettes, but a transposition where the writing will assert itself precise in essence, building from the inside and participating in a whole .
Let us take witness to the very beautiful frescoes produced in the chapel of the castle of Pradines, where Girieud painted alongside Lombard and Dufrénoy. (...) Girieud will use his enthusiasm to relearn in his pure tradition a profession which will retain in his hands its primitive power. He will not ignore anything of his resources, and will carry out in calm, far from selfish appetites, his Adoration of the Kings and the Shepherds, which marks an important page of his work. (...) Girieud would tell his cadets that the painter is not a philosopher, a literator or a scientist, but this visionary who, having his own language, must use it to express himself. What does the pictorial illustration of principles that do not go beyond theoretical concern matter to us. It leads us to the triumph of abstraction where the artist is reduced, as a superior worker plastically ordering mathematical powers whose emotional correspondences he did not know (....)
By restoring the artist to his true domain, he was asked at the same time for more requirements: a broad general culture, not this bookish primary education, but rather a self-enlargement in all domains, a way of feeling in depth, a faculty to reconstruct, order and compose. This is what Girieud brings us in statements made on the wall, demonstrating at the same time the plastic of his temperament. (...) His serious nature in surrounding himself with each composition of a very nurturing study site, and when the painting is organized, he will exteriorize it with admirable material. The color will slowly accumulate, crushed and smooth, to reach its depth, shine and density. A conscience of the artist who does not ignore the craftsman, will serve the thought of the poet. It was from this deep humility in the face of the highest aspirations that Girieud's style was born.
It is enough to have seen his drawings and the earthen figures which he often modeled, as if to imbibe the forms to be translated, before starting the canvas, to smile at the reproach of artificial which some watered. (...)
He acquired a technical perfection, quite rare in our time, a conquest affirmed by his latest portraits (....).Here is the coming of an imposing series of lithographs on the Amours, where Girieud, in opulent compositions, was able to translate into very beautiful painter, with the only power of intense and warm black to white of light, twelve poems where the gesture of love is renewed in the deepest evocations. And we remain confused in front of the unity of each plate, the colorful sensation it suggests, the new rhythms and whose cadence varies so clearly in each subject; one remains so admiringly confused that one would be happy to see this suite transform into a whole, vast composition framed by architecture. (....) |