| In the evolution of painting today, Pierre Girieud's work retains a very special character.
Pierre Girieud has always been animated by a classic or more exactly Latin spirit. His art is Mediterranean; but the sumptuousness of the subjects he likes to deal with never breaks strict discipline. We feel him nourished by Latin poets and for a long time he deeply felt the pure and harmonious beauty of the landscapes of his native Provence. This love of Latinity kept him away from the movements that upset painting, some 25 years ago.
Girieud then returned from a trip to northern Italy, Siena had left him an unforgettable memory.
Place Ravignan, however, a few meters from the house in the rue des Saules, cubism was born, the wild beasts filled the halls of the Grand Palais with their roars. But Girieud could not be taken by these new ideas, he brought with him an ideal and did not seek any other goal to achieve. It was the work of his whole life.
Later when, after the war, the neo-classics displayed, often with vain conceit, their return to the museum, Girieud less than ever was "on the page." Classic beauty as he conceived it, had nothing to do with the cold pastiches of the rascals who began to discover the Louvre to fall into an academy quickly became even flatter than that of the Institute. Girieud however continued his work, courageously, alone. He made an exhibition and then another.
Here is now a more complete set of his paintings at Galerie Druet. It's an exhibition that counts.
With some large figures are gathered small harmonious landscapes, limpid, orderly, colored like poems. The eyes and the soul rest while contemplating them. And it is in our time so brutally disordered a brand new impression of suddenly finding a rest of this quality. |