| A Marseillais who never believed that art was a galéjade, even at the time when he was looking for his way in the suite of Gauguin and Van Gogh, and where he painted the Temptation of Saint-Antoine.
His fauvism, - because Girieud was also a supporter of pure color, - was never exempt from a great concern for composition. His admiration for the work of Maurice Denis, like the one he has always devoted to Cézanne, is matched only by his love for the natural classicism of the landscapes of his native Provence. And these reasoned admiration and this love for land quickly brought him back to other concerns than that of color, to those of a plastic expression and colored shapes that were those of the great masters. Concerns of order and thought, which find in humanism their appeasement. The man who discovers in Gahguin's vahines a filiation of the virgins of Giotto, can not deny Poussin either. This explains the peaceful grandeur and the serene dignity of certain fairly recent compositions and decorations by the artist. This gives the light that bathes them its meaning and clarity. Speaking of Pierre Girieud, it is permissible to speak of pantheism, because his works bear the seal. Does he not identify nature with God, since he only wants to see its nobility and its exhilarating beauty.
From a stay in Greece, near the temples mutilated by time and erecting pediments and colonnades, in the pure azure of the Hellade, Pierre Girieud reported, not only multiple faces of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, but also the deep conviction that classical beauty was made of order, distinction and rhythms, and knew how to learn from it.
His art, increasingly stripped, appears today as that of an ascetic, the ascetic of which he took pleasure in giving the pensive image in his self-portrait.
Pierre Girieud is also an original lithographer and a powerful designer. We owe him, besides some remarkable illustrations, an album of lithography: Princesses of the Bible and the Fable, in which he associates the plenitude of feminine forms with the delicacy of harmoniously composed landscapes |