| (....) This is what, almost alone, Mr. Girieud dared to try. He has composed a temptation of Saint Anthony which seems at first glaring but which reveals one by one its solid and substantial qualities, a lot of intelligent work and research. It is a great effort and a very interesting result, which we feel agreeable when we remember the symbolist canvases of yesteryear and the value when we allow ourselves to be enveloped by its memories of the oriental arts. It must be realized that the subject imposed the stylization of the stained glass, while inviting to give, with the necessary veracity of the tones, the impression of a figuration of an oriental tapestry. Thanks to all this, the canonical and Asian sides - mummy and idol - of religion are expressed with relief, in an association of Gothic, Egyptian, Greek and Hindu reminiscences, with a disparate and warm luxury of oriental bazaar, an understanding analogies that bring together things that have, in addition to relations of color and line of evocative relations, and a rich imagination, ingenious to weave, close to arums, serpents of a gleaming and poisonous color of the hieratic courtesan the motionless and warm cockatoos, stupid and so eloquent in color. In the background, in this canvas whose general harmony is a volcanic tone (an emergence of all that is porphyry inside the Earth in the fauna and flora of the outside world) is crammed a Syrian casbah burning in the sunset, unfolds like a moving carpet a burning West of a flamboyant plumage. It is inadmissible that even those whose moderate Parisian taste does not like this kind of exotic painting, or who see the rather clear defects of this work, do not think of congratulating Mr. Girieud on his conscientious audacity and expecting a great deal of him. (...) |