| Here among us, to give precious lessons to our painters and to the students of our School of Fine Arts, Pierre Girieud. He is one of the most illustrious representatives of this marvelous flowering of painters of all kinds that we call the Paris School - quite the opposite of a School, to tell the truth, since the most diverse trends and even the most opposites meet there. But to mark a certain general predisposition to excellence, we found this word School to be convenient and we were right.
In this teeming forest where it is difficult to trace a path, to manage glades, Pierre Girieud has made his own domain his own. And perhaps in a region where it was most difficult to assert oneself, decidedly foreign to the outrageous, those of pure cerebrality, Cubist side, those of nervous passion and unleashed Fauves side, he opted for a climate of order and reason, let's say the word, classic. But, for once, and here is the miracle, these words mean neither coldness, nor drought, nor poverty, nor learned conventions or prowess of trade. On the contrary, this conscious discipline that Girieud imposes on his emotion, without cooling it, a sensuality that we can guess tumultuous under the appeasements that hold it back. In Pierre Girieud's nudes and landscapes there is an ardent taste for terrestrial food that an entirely Latin submission to the demands of reason does not deter.
This sun, these greenery, this Provencal, red, chaotic, nourishing soil, dispenser of colored juices, their power is felt by a temperament which contributes to their ardor and which, transfiguring them poetically on the canvas, imposes their presence there. The sun is seized in its scent generating sap, the greenery in the infinite richness of their tender and vigorous pushes, the earth in the torments of its skeleton, in the offer of its generous blood. And it is not surprising to see the Gods of ancient times returned to the middle of the Provencal pastures to converse and unite in a circle next to the ruins where they were once adored. |