THE MATERIALISATON OF THE SYNDROM OF THE PRISONER ON CANVASES OF DIFFERENT SIZES, SOME OF WHICH ARE COVERED WITH STAR SANDS, MAY CAUSE RETINAL DISTORTIONS.
Initially there are only scattered pieces. The room is large, white, and the light enters through a triangular opening with the tip pointing downwards. There is tiles on the floor and a crystal ball is placed next to an assembly of objects-the Tree of the Prophet, the plane of Saint-Exupéry, held in a metal net. There are also canvases, of all sizes, leaning against a wall.
In another room, there are books, some of which refer to secrets that only a few people are interested in. Perhaps they are too complicated, or too simple, at least certainly out of the reach of many, and the man who lives there, a prisoner, waiting for his release sometimes regrets that it is so.
He himself does not know why he is there or when his incarceration will end. He just knows that in order to thwart the traps of the length of a time that is not his he must solve a rebus whose data is found all around him, and which mixes what we commonly call space, memory, forms and origins.
He has at his disposal a number of elements which are like pieces of a puzzle which he will have to forge as he goes along. For this he has an irreproachable technique and fragments of stories that he must mix. Mixed with memories that evoke the strange fall of asteroids orbiting forgotten stars, the light of this past is everywhere, on the edge of the paintings he paints, calling upon the elemental spirits that inhabit our planet and direct them to the celestial vault, raising our gaze to a complexity of the world constantly posed before us, but whose keys we have forgotten.
Each work is therefore a door to an understanding of being, of its possibilities. If it openly flirts with myth, it is not like a frozen representation proposing schemes already acquired during the evolution of the painting, but rather like a boat sailing towards shores difficult to decipher. They mix with a conception of the classical world of approaches to seeing and becoming where inconceivable abysses are woven.
The prisoner waits for the good will of the judges. He knows that the canvases must be seen. Let them all take their dimension in their physical materialization. He patiently cut out force fields and mixed them with the sand that fell from the sky. Paradoxically, the result is immaterial. It plunges the gaze into a hypnotic circumference that transcends the horizon and makes the eye penetrate inside the natural strata of the memory of the world, of disappeared systems, where magnetism supplements a still primitive emergence of form. If all goes well, this is what visitors should perceive, without necessarily formulating it. What they will not know, however, is that, in fact, by his paintings, the prisoner tried to make himself with the means of the edge a raft allowing him to leave this dimension. Of course formulated in this way it can lend itself to smile.
Going with Eve, to the stars... With paintings. It’s something inconceivable.
Yes, if we still believe that the Earth is flat and that the sun revolves around us. But if you look closely at Guy-Rachel Grataloup’s paintings, they explain something else, a place where the geometry of the world is not fixed. And, my goodness, even if it is difficult to understand, that may be why there is painting.
Vincent Ravalec (writer) - 2007