| On Saturday I had the pleasure of paying tribute to one of the best artists of our time, the Bas-Alpin P. Girieud, from Riez.
We can consider as Sisteron one who superbly illustrated Domnine and synthesized in a pictorial page with his powerful talent the no less powerful work of Paul Arena. Girieud is an enthusiast of Sisteron. He knows all the Andrones, all around, does not dry up praises his sky, its amenities: He told me the other night his regret not having been able to feast on the dancing sun on the Durance and cicadas drumming their joy and their pride around the Citadel. But Girieud for two years was attacking an immense work that he wanted a masterpiece, something very expressive of his visions of his ideal, of his sincerity, of his faith in the beauty speaking to the soul and raising the spirits. This is the decoration of the vast hall of honor of the University of Poitiers. One hundred square meters to be covered not with a decoration but with a series of frescoes celebrating as in the past the sciences, the beautiful letters, what our fathers called the liberal arts. I mistakenly use the word fresco, knowing very well that the marouflage is something else, even if mural painting and fresco are confused today - we no longer use the florid colors of which Sline speaks. The caskets that Vitruvius was faking, did not leave their recipes - it would be necessary to discover them in the fragments of the villa Hadriana. Girieud painted on canvas what is labeled panels; thus time can compete, without risk of its bites against direct frescoes called tempera, wax, encaustic, which even under the varnish is withering. "The sight of a beautiful woman," wrote Plutarch, "leaves in the mind of an indifferent man only an image apt to fade away: such is the painting of the fresco, in the heart of a lover image is in a way fixed by the power of fire: it seems to breathe, to act, to speak, time never erases it ". This degeneration informs the layman of the value and merits of what I will call an illustration of an extremely complex and culturally demanding milieu, an originality that goes hand in hand with the consciousness, the knowledge and the talent.
Our fellow countryman has this gift and these qualities. He has nobly expressed them in this work, which for five days will be exhibited at the Tuileries in Paris, on the eve of Pentecote. This consecration will precede the one in the Poitevin capital, intellectual center for centuries and remained home of the thought, the good taste, according to the French traditions.
Poitiers possessed under Charles VII the Parliament of Paris, before which the king, I explained why waiting in the study on: Jacques Gelu, (Archbishop of Embrun) and Joan of Arc, the Maid appeared Three years later, in 1432, was founded the University, soon one of the most precisely renamed of France, and rival of that of Valence in Dauphiné. Let us not dwell on the poetic edges of the Clain, where we had so many delicious hours, we only need to know from the beginning of the school year, the admirable work of a master who is one of us; of a very modest artist because very gifted, I repeat it of one of the names that our time will yield gloriously in the future Girieud, child of Laugh the antique, our Arles of long ago between the Auvestre and the Colostre, resuscitates, without any doubt, some artist of those who edified and adorned the capital of Albiens. Without repetition, a land of mysterious date, sometimes after millennia wants to be translated by one of hers, that she marks with a sign, a genius. Girieud was the chosen member of Haute Provence so that our region would have its worthy place in the art of now.
Let us just applaud this fervent friend of Sisteron and rejoice to count this perfect artist among the Alpins |