| Here among us, to give precious lessons to our painters and to the students of our School of Fine Arts, Pierre Girieud. He is one of the most illustrious representatives of this marvelous flowering of painters of all kinds that we call the Paris School - quite the opposite of a School, to tell the truth, since the most diverse trends and even the most opposites meet there. But to mark a certain general predisposition to excellence, we found this word School to be convenient and we were right.
In this teeming forest where it is difficult to trace a path, to manage glades, Pierre Girieud has made his own domain his own. And perhaps in a region where it was most difficult to assert oneself, decidedly foreign to the outrageous, those of pure cerebrality, Cubist side, those of nervous passion and unleashed Fauves side, he opted for a climate of order and reason, let's say the word, classic. But, for once, and here is the miracle, these words mean neither coldness, nor drought, nor poverty, nor learned conventions or prowess of trade. On the contrary, this conscious discipline that Girieud imposes on his emotion, without cooling it, a sensuality that we can guess tumultuous under the appeasements that hold it back. In Pierre Girieud's nudes and landscapes there is an ardent taste for terrestrial food that an entirely Latin submission to the demands of reason does not deter.
This sun, these greenery, this Provencal, red, chaotic, nourishing soil, dispenser of colored juices, their power is felt by a temperament which contributes to their ardor and which, transfiguring them poetically on the canvas, imposes their presence there. The sun is seized in its scent generating sap, the greenery in the infinite richness of their tender and vigorous pushes, the earth in the torments of its skeleton, in the offer of its generous blood. And it is not surprising to see the Gods of ancient times returned to the middle of the Provencal pastures to converse and unite in a circle next to the ruins where they were once adored.
In Spain, the greens are read dry, the land thicker and the cherished opposition of endless greens and reddish or purplish reds is exasperated.
In Greece, it is the return to calm fervor, the blessed limpidity of a morning from Nafplion, fragile in ruins caressed with rays by eternal love.
In Egypt, finally, the air is getting lighter, the earth unifies its effects, the focus of warm tones comes from distant mountains pierced by tombs. Let us admire everywhere the art of creating light by the simplest nuances, the accuracy of the glance which finds the exact value to model the mountain and the tree as well as the column or the breast; and this beautiful thickness of unctuous, fluent, soft and ripe material, without heaviness.
A portrait only is not enough to capture one of the strongest aspects of Girieud's talent and we only have the photos from the Druet album to get an idea of ??these great decorative compositions where Girieud resuscitated the daring to fill large walls when no one, Maurice Denis aside, had dared to go back to it since Puvis de Chavanne. An album of lithographs again which shows which shows an astonishing sense of the resources of composition with two characters, the fervor of his taste for the antique and above all, in a pure state, this very precious drawing, this pencil which leaves by its caresses on the contours the tasty impression of the patient and painstaking journey towards the perfection of the ideally designed form.
To have been looking for this Master to ask him for the lesson of his experience is what does honor to contemporary Egypt and to the new taste for the arts that we feel to flourish there.
- Reproduction of painting : The Parthénon |