| (...) here, at Druet's, Pierre Girieud, become a painter from Greece. In the religious solitudes of Delphi with austere lines, in the stormy or morning light of the Gulf of Nafplion, at the bottom of the real green Arcadia or before the long perspectives of the islands without shade, a compatriot of Charles Maurras discovered, with joy that we share the fullness of this eurhythmy that his original Provence or the mystical Italy of the Quattrocento made him sense; but a whole "series" of varied aspects in the unity of a sober decor that he devotes to the Acropolis of Athens according to the views and the hours that put the roses of twilights on the columns with tones ripe ears; and what an intimate, but noble poetry in this view of Ceramics where the cypresses alternate, under the pediment of the blue hills, with the ruined marbles! From Arles theater to pure Parthenon, as we feel that the Marseille decorator of Jas de Puy vert and the University of Poitiers is happy to add his stanza to the living poem of light and to take his place among these painters of the Acropolis that will have to be reunited one day like those of Venice, from Aligny and François-Edouard Bertin to the late René Ménard who brought us, from April 1911, such a personal and pathetic vision of Athens.
When we know how to see, we do not question in vain this splendor which takes the form of a temple: now, the full awareness of the reconquered line appears to us far superior to these "secrets" of a more or less occult inspiration or spiritist, therefore all involuntary, and which, according to Paul Valéry, "reduces the author to the role of spectator" but the airbrush, in turn, wishes to enlarge the horizon; but would not the best success of the imagination be the eternally white canvas in which the "unknown masterpiece" of Balzac inexplicably fits. (....)----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Druet art album dedicated to the work of Pierre Girieud, this Latin from the Transalpine who recalls his ancestors, whose Roman busts can be seen in
Aix-en-Provence museum. does he not conclude: "He has their strength, their wisdom, their faith and their worship of this well thought-out high poetry, whose tradition had almost lost itself and whose great classics of the end of the 19th century. Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, have rediscovered the source for the ages to come.
From Arles theater to landscapes in Greece, from Homage to Naked Beauty (1921) to decorative allegories commissioned by the clear-sighted and courageous taste of M. André François-Poncet for the University of Poitiers, this classicism has reappeared at the home of a former student in the studio of Gustave Moreau, a fervent admirer of Gauguin in Provence. |