It was in 1964, during a trip to Gordes with Menthon’s family, that GRATALOUP discovered the bories that a friend of his, Moskochenko, had told him about in Lyon.

For the artist, the archetypal bory is omnipresent in the thought of the architect, as in that of the man in general, who, when he left the cave, had the preoccupation of reconstructing it.

These piles of dry stones gave birth to the Bories series. They were exhibited in 1976 at the Marquet Gallery (Paris).

"I had a friend named Moskochenko who drew trees and landscapes of Provence. He had a little Bastide in Roussillon. He was Lyon like me. We ended up at the «Caveau» when I was in Lyon. There was a lot of talk about André Lhote, a cubist painter who wrote about art and his book “Traité de la figure et du paysage”. He analyzed, among other things, the paintings of Van Gogh, Paul Klee, Cézanne. He was very learned and had his studio in Paris. But I didn’t live in Paris, I lived in Lyon. I lived at that time with Madeleine Lambert.

Borie is a heap of dry stones from the south of France and Southern Europe that, in my time, served as a tool shed or a halt in the shade. But in fact, it is a primitive architecture like the Buddhist KERN with sexual figuration".