For Grataloup, the pictorial act is close to the sacred.He tries to conjure, to tame primitive energy by forms and color.He questions the matter of the cosmos, the earth, the stone, the metal, the wood, the sand in which the spirit blows.In this constant dialogue with nature, he appeals to memory.If his universe is nourished by visions, memories, a Edenic nostalgia as the legacy of the Adamic times and a lost paradise, his mysteries are of a symbolic order.
For a mystical interrogation, he uses an alchemy of matter at the service of a cosmic theme, a reflection of the original matrix.He tries to hide their complex and mysterious texture from the mineral and the plant by multiplying the rubbing, incorporating cuttings that he mixes with fragments of metal and gold sheets glued, stencils associated with acrylic and oil pastel.The artist claims the medieval heritage of craftsmanship.He mastered the techniques, from miniature to chisel, preparing his support covered with successive layers of paint, polished, taken up until the simulation of a quasi-fleshly skin.Organic, his painting is a ploughed field, foam, rocky strata or alluvial plains.The pictorial surface is alternately microcosm and macrocosm of the ground as of the firmament, animated by slight irregular reliefs in response to the occult forces of the exploited materials.Their thickness has a symbolic dimension.
ASPIRATION TO THE INFINITE
The splendour of blacks, golds and cerulean blues, cadmium reds, greens and yellows, imparts a sensual flavor.In its sumptuous sets, pure color blazes.In the articulation of the spatial planes and openings, it intervenes as a source of a suggested perspective.The unlimited yearns for our gaze to the point of making imperceptible the illusory figuration which, in a simulacrum of abstraction, makes visible this impalpable in-between.Between void and matter, light radiates.
His transmutations are of the order of the sacred, as are nature and man.The mind emerges from the balance between the visible and the invisible, between substance and emptiness.Matter is attuned to the dream of the mind.Man and the universe are reconciled in an infinite poetic and spiritual.
Paris 2003 - Lydia Harambourg (art Historian)