Rachel-Guy Grataloup, who has just finished an exhibition at the Marquet Gallery and is preparing another one this summer at the Maison de la Culture in La Seyne s/mer, near Toulon, is a linear artist with very different concerns.
He creates series that find their starting point through a drawing «on the motif», which is then transposed on the canvas.All the lines on this first drawing are incised so that the original drawing can be reproduced, in different colors and with many variations on other canvases by rubbing the «matrix» with pastel.The variations are thought out at length, both conceptually and visually.
We find for example some landscapes that can be viewed through different seasons, and/or at different times of the day.They sort of represent the negative version of one or the other.
Through this process of transformation, Grataloup tries to convey his belief in the universality of every aspect of nature.A tree can thus resemble the sun, symbol of energy and growth;and at the same time one can realize the inevitable dualities: an explosion of matter that holds still a radiation that consumes a fragility in bloom.
The artist explains that such a subject could inspire him in his work a lifetime.Since it can find all the existence in the fragmentation of the basalt, in the brilliant sudden rise of the sea and the sculpted skin of the sand, we understand then that for it, all the subjects form only one.
Michael Peppiatt (art historian) - Paris mai 1978