Artist Gerard Garouste creates a medley between the metaphorical and the melancholic through his radical and revolutionary paintings, says Uma Nair
Take the transcription of truth, colour it with the fantasy of literature, brush it with the spirit of the Bible, weave in the miracles of a few saints and you get the surreal palette of Gerard Garouste, France’s favourite artist. Framed in the pinnacle of pain amid trials and conflicts, he showcases his select Retrospective of 60 paintings that mirror the beauty of creating something new for one’s own satiety.
Author and artist Garouste’s words form the ferment of fantasy and surrealism. He said, “If art is everywhere, it is nowhere. If I believe neither in progress in art nor in the diktat of the clean slate, I think on the other hand a painter must know his culture well to be able to forget it and to play it freely.”
Learning at the Louvre in isolation
Garouste learnt his profession as a painter during his initiation at the Louvre Museum in Paris. “For Garouste to stand alone in front of the works and study the history of art and techniques of painting was an odyssey of self-discovery,” says director-general, NGMA Adwaita Gadanayak. According to Garouste, learning a lot from the masters who preceded him made him aware of his heritage and he was indebted. But he is a rare example of a genius who has struggled between a hoary world of a bipolar disorder and the sanity of sitting in his studio and painting.
Garouste says that in every artist, two characters co-exist — the classic and the Indian. In his words to France’s legendary paper, Le Figaro, he said, “One never moves without the other just as intuition cannot do without reason. They are inseparable. I have one foot in a classic technique, which involves roughing, glazing and impasto, and the other in a surreal and expressionist way of treating my subjects.”
Influence of Christianity
Garouste has long been fascinated with the influence of Christianity on French culture and his most famous work explores the myth of Faust as presented by Goethe in 1808 — a man arguing with God and the Devil about his fate. Using oil on canvas and gouache, he examines the main themes of Goethe’s tragedy, and the quest for knowledge, desire for pleasure, nature of evil, the idea of wagers, pacts with the malevolent forces and the alchemy of life.
Literature and the art of questioning
He uses the powerful imagery stemming from literature and the essential art of questioning to create his enchanting canvasses. His fantastical paintings combine restlessness and joy of their various protagonists. There are creatures like apes, scapegoats and geese, which keep us agog.
His sensibility is born of self-learning. His interest in the texts of Western culture began in the 1980s. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Rabelais’ Gargantua, followed by examining sacred texts of the Bible, Judaisim and the Talmud for a decade.
His satirical stances are full of stories and Warsaw Bridge and Donkeys is an emblematic image that adds to the richness of repertoire, full of metaphors and meandering conversations within and without.
Faces of friends and family
The faces in these canvasses are full of intensity. He uses the faces of his friends and family to illustrate the various characters. They are swamped with references and allusions. Some are softer but they are all living within the intensity of dreams. His human figures leap out of the canvas. He transforms possibilities of representation by co-opting classic models of antiquity and recreating them with a new, expressive and imaginative power. In his own self portrait, we see a portrait of Renaissance blended into the promise of the Baroque, oscillating between Classicism and Christianity.
Riot of spectrum
Colours for Garouste are a riot of spectrum — ranging from elegant greys to puissant purples, gay greens and velvet blacks. His characters do not have predictable forms but they are theatrical sometimes and have archaic outlines that emerge as in his earliest work, The Boat and the Fisherman.
Each face on his canvas is a character to be studied. He is constantly metamorphosing between characters from literature and history. The Boat and the Fisherman and Three Masters and Fatted Geese are examples of brilliance in conception and composition. His mastery of the rules of classical painting is counterbalanced by his total pictorial freedom, intuition and rambling wildness in his composition of human hybrids.
Timeless figurative
His pliant brush celebrates human figures. He extols a timeless, figurative painting style, which was a daring choice at a time when France was in the grip of avant grade expression. His works have a lyrical moodiness to them and you, at once, know that music is a part of his everyday sensibility. His words in an interview hold true, “The more I apply myself to a simple, basic shape, like someone practising a violin, the more I am able to start inventing my own music.” It is in this spirit that Garouste approaches the old masters and ancient texts. Oscillation of the past and the present like a pendulum that keeps time — you get drawn into the maw of his characters.
The scenes depicted in these paintings are particularly radical, revolutionary and resonating with rhythms full of human emotions.
At the NGMA, around 60 oil paintings draw on satire, sadness and humour to produce a fusion of a whole range of symbols. Between bridges and rivers, animated and morphed characters, we see fat and plucked geese, herds of cute donkeys, and familiar and unfamiliar figures like Pinocchio, Kafka and Borges. In a free association of images and ideas, Garouste delights us with overthrowing prevailing interpretations and creating a medley between the metaphorical and the melancholic.
(The show runs at NGMA till 28 March.)