GRATALOUP - Jean-Louis Ferrier - The Implied Worlds

The Painter’s Eye - GRATALOUP - 1991 - 136 cm x 275 cm

In 1993, art critic and historian Jean-Louis Ferrier dedicated a monograph to the work of GRATALOUP.

In his introduction, he recounts his first encounter with the paintings in the artist's Parisian studio and the awe he felt before a work which he immediately considered profoundly unique.

In it, he analyzes the color, the texture, the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of this painting and seeks to understand its foundations.

"This painting was unlike any other, neither ancient nor modern. It did not follow any fashion and could not be linked to any school."

We reproduce here the full text of this introduction , an essential testimony of the view taken by Jean-Louis Ferrier on the work of GRATALOUP.

Jean-Louis Ferrier — 1993 Introduction to the monograph dedicated to GRATALOUP

I will never forget my first visit to Grataloup's studio, although I don't recall the exact date. It was a few years ago, in the spring, I think, or early summer, late in the morning. The Parisian light was clear, the weather was beautiful. The artist's canvases, generally large in size, were barely visible in his cramped studio. To get a good distance, we had to move them into the courtyard, landscaped with grass and flowers, and place them side by side against the glass roof.

Grataloup primarily painted trees of life, supplemented by a few enchanted islands and paradises. These were timeless themes, but treated in such a personal way that his paintings resembled no other, neither ancient nor modern. They followed no fashion and could not be attributed to any school. I was dazzled by them.

What impressed me most at first was the artist's skill as a colorist, evident in the paintings before me. Not that Grataloup's work resembled Fauvist impasto or Expressionist excesses, but rather that his tones were characterized by their extreme lightness, revealing a script of interlacing lines unfolding from bottom to top. Color was in tension with the texture. There was, in this art, a mysterious and fascinating visual interplay.

I later learned, when we got to know each other better, that Grataloup was a follower of Theosophy. Many painters before him had been, such as Mondrian, whose grids formed by the intersection of black verticals and horizontals derive in large part from the theories of Schoenmaekers, a Dutch Theosophist. Or Herbin, a brilliant but unsung artist, whom I met several times towards the end of his life and who explained to me how much he owed to the thought of Rudolf Steiner, though I didn't pay much attention to it at the time.

Theosophy, in my view, consisted mainly of table-turning, according to what I had heard about the infamous Madame Blavatsky, but I was mistaken. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that it is by no means a vague spiritualism. On the contrary, theosophists emphasize that matter and spirit communicate, that true spirituality is embodied, that there are not material realities at ground level and spiritual ones above, but rather that they are inextricably linked and divine. Everything, according to theosophical doctrine, stems from a circulation of energy that flows through all things: the seemingly inanimate mineral world, plants, animals, humankind—an oar spread throughout the entire universe, in communion with cosmic life. It's like a kind of applied mysticism.

Art plays a leading role in this, because, according to her, not only do words, forms, sounds, and colors remain insignificant when they lack a spiritual foundation, but they are also the necessary revealer of all spirituality, in contrast to the deadly breath exhaled by abstract thought. Color in particular—the psychic relationships between blue and red or between blue and yellow, the antagonism of black and white—elevates reality to the realm of the spirit.

Theosophy also speaks of spiritual corpses, a concept easily identifiable, for example, in a painting by Dubuffet. It seeks, on the contrary, a plenitude. The very same plenitude that I felt from the very first moment, without suspecting its origin, in Grataloup's painting.

However, even if it stems from it, this work cannot be explained, in its various aspects, graphic, aesthetic, archetypal, by theosophy alone.

Therefore, the following pages will be devoted to elucidating its broader implications and consequences.