| Team spirit is in honor in all branches of activity. It has even been extended to artists, people who are essentially individualists, and applied among them to more or less dissimilar results. At least one seems particularly happy: the decoration of the village hall of the town hall of Ivry, executed with the collaboration of Miss d'Andréis and Simonnot, of Messrs Boulainghier, Chenu-Tournier, Chesneau, Maxime Girieud, Kresser- Desportes, Lanos, Poly, and Poupart, the prime contractor being Mr. Pierre Girieud, prime contractor in all the meaning of the term _ always on site, drawing the lines, choosing the colors, monitoring the execution in its smallest parts, taking a large part.
Mr. Pierre Girieud is a Mediterranean man, fond of synthesis and who, by instinct, aims at the universal. Its composition unfolds in broad rhythms, the table of human activities, the family forming the main motif in a group where the mother is in the spotlight, central figure which evokes the ancient Demeter. We are here far from any episodic mode. Whether it is to symbolize the sciences or to describe the rest and the sports which take a large part in our concerns, the various scenes, with their naked or draped characters, are of all times, out of the small contingencies which could weaken the great lesson they bring. The drapery clothes most of the actors. Hardly, here and there, lost on the whole, a modern detail appears, a bicycle or a car, but everything else classic in its general aspect, in this room of vast proportions.
Classic and traditional, Mr. Girieud revives his designs to those of the masters of the Renaissance. Certain figures of Virtue superimposed in niches ending in shells, turn the spirit towards our XVI ° century. Everything appears noble, calm and serene as soon as you enter this room where the frescoes covering the entire wall take place under a frieze with a lapis blue background - decorated with nudes in a uniform ocher tone in their voluntary and precise design.
This frieze runs at the top passing over the windows which dictate the width, thus preventing the composition from being broken by these large windows, as it inexorably is by the access doors. But Mr. Girieud knew how to inscribe these last openings in his composition with remarkable ingenuity and make the obstacles themselves serve his ends.
This sumptuous decoration, one of the largest made in recent years, is a tribute to our time. The village hall of Ivry Town Hall is today a sort of secular chapel, the serenity of which invites meditation. It will bear the name of Pierre Girieud towards the future who understood the decorative role of the fresco, used in a powerful and sonorous orchestration, without any blandness. Perhaps, rejecting the oil painting, he thought with Michelangelo that it is good only for the lazy. Ten months of frantic and uninterrupted labor have led to a result which should be cited as an example, as the whole life of a painter devoted to Art is to be cited as an example with admirable selflessness and faith. |