| (...) Following some others, Mr. Pierre Girieud returned to the primitives. Along the way, he met Gauguin and Van Gogh who convinced him more. Why this return to primitives? It is that there is at this moment in the young painting a push, an incredible training towards the wall decoration and the fresco. Almost all the true, the sincere among our current Independents are decorators, frescoists (.....) I am afraid that all our efforts remain sterile in a century when painting is collected as snuffboxes and stamps- post office, where the work of art is considered speculative by those who, precisely, are the only ones with the beautiful wall surfaces to decorate. They do not, because it would be impossible for them to resell these decorations with profit. (....) I have been painting for a long time, the artist tells us; but the certainties I wanted to find, I asked them to the only masters who disappeared. I never went to school: the museums, then the frescoes of the Italians trecento and the work of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, definitely oriented me to decorative painting .. What I owe them it is the way to organize my feelings pictorially and to give emotion, issie of the Idea, a plastic form. Is that not to say that I am an idealist, in constant revolt against the realism which, is it not, has really had its day? Does the public discern this well in the paintings that I exposed to the Independents, in the last ones, which are stacked against the walls of this workshop? I am not satisfied, even for a study, trying to give the external appearance of the object, it is further, inside the volumes established plastically, that I seek: Emotion, expression, decoration. This is the symbolic triangle of my art religion. And in these works that are your eyes, in those, very near that I will be performing in the South, landscapes retained in my memory since childhood, and that I hope to find enlarged with my current understanding. (....) |