| Apart from a few Norman prints dated 1904 and a few from Rome and Venice, Siena and San Giminiano executed in 1906 and 1907, all of Pierre Girieud's work is dedicated to celebrating the beauties and the charm of his little homeland, the Provence. (...)
Infinitely demanding of himself, Girieud develops slowly, perfects methodically. Instead of giving free rein to his gifts, he disciplines them, he restrains them; his ambitions, he curbs them. First acquire your profession, forge your tool, Everything is there. And who does not know, alas! what abnegation, what spirit of sacrifice, what tenacity must be armed today, to achieve it, any artist worthy of the name, given that there is no longer a school where the art technically. So, like so many of his colleagues, Girieud had to create his own profession, forge himself the tool he had the foreknowledge that he would need to say what he had to say, to express what he had to express. (...) But to these fundamental qualities of which I spoke above, there were added others, and no less precious, by which this already rich individuality was completed. They came to him at their time, quite naturally, as a fruit comes to maturity under the beneficent heat of the sun, I was going to say about life. The gravity, formerly still a little fierce, of Girieud's talent has softened and relaxed; without losing any of its firmness and vigor, it became refined and tender; without waning in the least, he became able to fix more subtle, more nuanced, more delicate aspects of things; without ceasing to be the solid and strong builder that we know and that concerns above all the search for character, the density of forms and volumes, not in their fleeting appearance but in what constitutes their eternal essence, he perceives, he feels , is able to translate deeper, more complex truths (....) I would also like to note with what particular science - or what mysterious instinct - and what rare happiness, Girieud excels in prolonging, widening beyond the limits imposed on him by the chosen motif and the format of the canvas, this very motif and this format. Each landscape develops as out of the frame, goes beyond the frame. What is this due to? I cannot say. Perhaps to this, that, familiar as he is with the subjects he treats, knowing them thoroughly, in all their intimacy, Girieud, better than anyone, can relate them to the whole of which they are part and crystallize in the limits which it imposes on them or which are imposed on them by them, not only all the features by which they differ from each other, but the dominant characters of what surrounds them, the whole soul of the region to which they belong (....)-------------------------------------------------------------------
Reproduction of : View of Lourmarin, Notre Dame de Beauvoir in Moustiers Saintes-Marie, ladscape of Tourves, Route de Cadenet à Cucuron, Rocher de la Vierge in Tourves |