| 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 when he painted the Temptation of Saint Anthony.
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 that which 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 and colorful expression of the forms that were those of the great masters. His concern for order and thought, which finds in humanism its appeasement. The man who discovers in Gauguin's vahines a filiation of the virgins of Giotto, can not deny the Chick 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 sovereign nobility and exhilarating beauty.
From a stay in Greece, near temples mutilated by time and erecting pediments and colonnades in the pure azure of the Hellade, Pierre Girieud reported, not only the multiple faces of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, but also the conviction deep that classical beauty was made of order 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 lithographs: Princesses de la Bible de de la Fable, in which he combines the fullness of female forms with the delicacy of harmoniously composed landscapes. |