| After a long absence, Pierre Girieud brings together (at the Rosenberg gallery) a series of paintings where he asserts himself with an intelligent and sensual mastery. I think, in front of his works, the voluptuous way of the painters of the Lombard school; but this is only a first clash, an exchange of analogies, and I am anxious to arrive at what constitutes the simple and reasoned grandeur of the landscapes and compositions of this artist, for whom beauty Attitudes are nothing if they do not reach the deep expression of feeling.
Pierre Girieud, in fact, has not only the concern to register, in a harmonious balance, the rhythm and cadence of the human body. He attaches too much value to the decor. He is too close to joy. He loves and suffers too much. So he gives us this emotion, unequaled, to share with them the distress of Sappho, Ariadne and Leda's amorous ecstasy. Nothing that is at home the very image of feeling. But what a passion to paint! what lusts! what meditative and slow searches of the natural! Here are the Three Graces, which I knew; here is Adam and Eve, whose splendor is without blemish.
We fought a lot at Girieud during the last Salon d'Automne, where he exhibited the Toilet of Venus. He was reproached for the very spirit of this painting, and I do not understand why, for a single instant, his art, where everything is enchantment and nobility, has been brought closer to another where artifice has the first power. Landscapes, on the other hand, were more successful.
These landscapes appear in Rosenberg's, and they are, perhaps, the highest testimony that Girieud has given us of his talent. Landscapes of St. Martha, Eguilles, Luberon, Cassis and Siena ... The strength united to sweetness ... Everything has this accent and severity, without which the most beautiful spectacle of the world is inert. Everything is contained by the possession of oneself, and the depth of the atmosphere, the mobility of lights, the fullness and the savory accuracy of volumes, plans, forms, and values ??are certainly an example of majestic and headstrong authority. This, moreover, is not to surprise me. Girieud is sincere, and his "inspiration", which naturally brings him to the conception of the Great and sometimes the Sublime (as the Classics wrote), also knows how to approach Nature with the most attentive complacency. |