A major retrospective at the Center Pompidou is dedicated to the work of Gérard Garouste. In this interview, the artist gives us his relationship to dreams, language, tales and their place in his painting.
One of the most important living French painters, Gerard Garouste76, exhibits at the start of the school year in Paris at Centre Pompidou. From September 7 to January 2 will be held a major retrospective, under the sign of fables, poems and dreams, devoted to the pictorial, graphic and sculptural work, of his journey and his elusive work. In an interview given to Knowledge of the Arts, the artist talks about his apprehension of this upcoming event, his relationship to myths, alphabet and legends.
Knowledge of the Arts: The Center Pompidou is devoting an important retrospective to you where 120 of your works dating from the 1970s to the present day are presented. How do you approach this event?
Gerard Garouste: This retrospective deploys in fact several aspects. First, a reissue of my autobiographical book L’Intranquille published by L’Iconoclaste. This is the best catalog to present my painting. The key event is of course this major retrospective at the Center Pompidou and then, not far from there, rue Chapon, another exhibition takes place, a very small one. At the young Drawn Arts gallery, with an artist, Édouard Cohen, whose style is to invent a alphabet. I attach great importance to this four-handed exhibition because it is about transmission. It is also closely linked to the last room of the Beaubourg route. Sophie Duplaix, the curator, wanted a chronology that starts with my first paintings until the works of my last exhibition on Kafka, “Correspondances (Gérard Garouste – Marc-Alain Ouaknin)” which I presented at the Templon gallery in 2021 This last room raises a question to which one of the answers can be found in the gallery of comic arts where we evoke the « Méguila d’Esther ». Paradoxically, this biblical myth is presented in a form profane.
Gérard Garouste, The Crossroads of Sources, 1999-2000, oil on canvas, 114 × 146 cm, Private collection, France
Can you tell it?
This is the text that the Jews read on the feast of Purim. It tells the story of Ahashverosh, King of Persia, and Queen Esther. At one point, Prime Minister Haman wants to eliminate all Jews, thus creating the plan for the first Jewish genocide. But he is discovered and hanged. Queen Esther is victorious. Word « méguila » means ” roll “ in Hebrew but also translates to “unveiled », and the first name Esther can mean “hidden”, “secret”. The Megillah of Esther could therefore be translated as “the unveiling of the secret”.
Le théâtre de Don Quichotte, 2012, oil on canvas, 200 × 260 cm, Collection Hervé Lancelin, Luxembourg © Bertrand Huet/Tutti
What is the keystone of the Center Pompidou retrospective?
My themes are legends, fables, fairy tales. They are closely linked to my childhood and to Burgundy, which I adored. These texts are the subjects of my painting: how to position yourself, what do you do with a story, how to treat it? How is she told? What is said, what is not said. Obviously, what is not said is essential. I attach more importance to the space that exists between the paintings than to the paintings themselves. That said, I of course hope that the paintings will please!
The Rabbi and the Birds Nest, 2013, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm, private collection
In this retrospective, do you invite visitors to come into contact with the unknown that lies within them?
About the unknown, I would say the following: we all have dreams, we can tell them, therefore we can write them down. If they are written, it is because they are translated into words and there precisely begins the interpretation of the dream. The dream has interest only in its interpretation and not by its story. In a dream there is always a conscious part and an unconscious part. To unveil the unconscious part, there are different observations: one of them, the Zeugma, is the subject of a room in the exhibition where the unsaid are precisely staged.
Gérard Garouste, Adhara, 1981 Oil on canvas 253 × 395 cm Liliane & Michel Durand-Dessert Photo © Florian Kleinefenn
Since we are talking about the dream, a very long time ago, I woke up with the very precise memory that a voice-over gave me the following advice: “You know in life, there are two kinds of people, the Classics and the Indians! » I would have understood my dream if it had been about classics and moderns or cowboys and Indians, but the Classic-Indian relationship seemed strange to me. I spoke about it to my friend Jean-Michel Ribes who had done a thesis in Spanish and who gave me the key to this dream: “You made a pun between classic and cassique”. A cassique is an Indian leader for the Spanish conquistadors. Today, taken in its modern interpretation, a cassique is someone who is successful. One could therefore say that the Classic is success with an Apollonian side and that the Indian, with his intuition, is much more Dionysian. This relationship between the Classical and the Indian is found in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in Faust and Mephistopheles, and also in the white clown and the Augustus, one in his costume of light, the other colorful in his madness. The whole exhibition sails on this complementarity.
Pinocchio et la partie de dés, 2017, oil on canvas, 160 × 220 cm, Particular Collection © Adagp, Paris, 2022 © Photo Bertrand Huet/Tutti
What do you want to pass on to young artists?
The experience that I draw from an essay by Roland Barthes, where the philologist asks the following question: by opening a dictionary, how is a word defined? To define a word, it requires fifty other words, and each of these words itself refers to other words. Thus, we go around the dictionary without ever having an answer. Language is turned on itself and that is why the author can create a fiction. What reassured me is that since the hand on the cave prehistoric until the work of Duchamp, we went around the plastic. And it is because the circle is complete that the painting can begin.
“Gerard Garouste”
Centre Pompidou
19 rue Beaubourg, 75004 Paris
from September 7 to January 2, 2023