L’art qui aide à vivre selon Gérard Garouste

About the exhibition "Gérard Garouste - Retrospective" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 7 September 2022 to 2 January 2023.

For a long time he was scorned by French institutions and the artistic avant-garde, probably because he entered the art world through the door of the Palace, a Parisian theatre that he himself described as "a den of glitter and champagne". Nevertheless, the great art dealer Leo Castelli made no mistake in taking him under his wing immediately after his 1982 exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery, a prestigious New York art gallery. The author of an exuberant figurative work, represented since 2002 by Daniel Templon's illustrious contemporary art gallery, Gérard Garouste is now back through another door, less glittery, but oh so prestigious, since he is the subject of the Centre Pompidou's fall exhibition, entitled "Gérard Garouste - Retrospective", which runs from 7 September to 2 January in the Parisian temple of modern and contemporary art.

It must be said that since the 1988 exhibition, which was made possible by the friendship between him and Bernard Blistène, then director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, the artist, who was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2017, has not been idle. And that his work became much more luminous in the eyes of all when "L'Intranquille" was published in 2009, his autobiography written with Judith Perrignon, lifting the veil on his childhood as the son of an anti-Semitic collaborator and his stays in a psychiatric hospital.

It is therefore no coincidence that Gérard Garouste studied Hebrew and that his work is as much inspired by the Talmud or the Bible as by Dante or Cervantes, Goethe or Rabelais. For him, the founding religious texts "are great moments of poetry, which must be read like Mallarmé. And the idea is to have fun. Because what interests him is "the philosophical substratum that emerges from these stories". A philosophy that is not based on theory, but rather on storytelling. "The Talmud is divided into two parts, the laws (the Halacha) and the narrative (the Aggada), which is of much greater interest to painters," explains Gérard Darouste this month in Art Press.

"It's a sum of little stories that give keys, if one is able to detect them. We remain in the realm of the secret. From these codes of reading derives another framework which is the Kabbalah. Contrary to what one might think, my real subject in painting is words. It is not the words that explain the story. To understand words and letters, you need a foundation called a story. But the story is only secondary. And to quote this edifying example: "In Hebrew mythology, the letters of the word 'donkey' in Hebrew are the same as for the word 'matter'. When we see the Messiah enter Jerusalem sitting on a donkey, it is the spirit that dominates matter. The root of the word matters more than the animal itself.

In an interview with Gérard Garouste for the latest issue of the contemporary art magazine Art press, of which he is the editor-in-chief, Richard Leydier evokes, in reference to the book "L'Intranquille - Autoportrait d'un fils, d'un peintre, d'un fou" (The Intranquil - Self-portrait of a son, a painter, a madman), "the very clear memory of a whirlwind, a tornado". And the artist announces that this book has now been reissued by the Proche collection "and increased by an epilogue", while confiding, with regard to this moving two-faceted confession - "the delirium, and the child confronted with the secrets of his family" - that, in the end, "it was very easy for me to recount all this because I had undergone psychoanalysis. The advantage of psychoanalysis is that you are no longer afraid of yourself or of others, you are not fooled.

In this monumental retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, nearly 120 paintings, often large format, but also sculptures, installations and drawings, brought together by curator Sophie Duplaix, will allow visitors to grasp the whole of Gérard Garouste's production. A production that combines his personal history and his preoccupations with time and transmission, but also his literary references and Jewish mysticism. "Finally, the whole exhibition is encircled by a theme, that of unveiling, the alternation of the hidden and the revealed," the artist explains to Richard Leydier. "In the middle of the exhibition, there is the Megillah-Esther, a four-metre long scroll telling the story of Queen Esther, whose name in a nutshell means the secret. All my paintings revolve around absence. The last triptych, The Banquet (2021), takes up this story.

And Jean-Michel Ribes' friend, who has always had "the occult of intuition and the light of classical reason" rubbing shoulders in his paintings, in the same way that "the Classic and the Indian" have been going side by side since the first theatrical show he created in 1978, ultimately expects only questions from this exhibition. He hopes that people will "say to themselves: what is he getting at? That they will be animated by questions. That they acquire anything but imposed knowledge. Questions. Why so many fairy tales? Why is it funny? I think there is a lot of fun in the stories I tell.

Although on reflection, Gérard Garouste also expects something else from this high-profile Parisian exhibition. "La Source has existed for 32 years. And the Centre Pompidou exhibition should be a turning point because we want to acquire a national dimension," he confides to Richard Leydier. The artist's atypical career, whose works of art for sale today attest to a real popular success, has never been limited to the hushed world of museums and art galleries. In addition to his abundant pictorial creativity, which gives rise to canvases that are as disturbing as they are joyful, combining portraits and strange bestiary, Gérard Garouste created La Source in 1991 with his wife, the famous designer Elisabeth Garouste, in the Eure region of France where he now lives and works. An association with a social and educational vocation through plastic expression, aimed at children and young people in difficulty, or even in situations of exclusion.

"My childhood was psychologically difficult. For me, drawing was what made me wave my arms when I was drowning. It saved me. At least I existed through it," the artist explains to Richard Leydier. "I remembered this when I created The Source: art is a wonderful tool for children. Not to make them artists, but to help them live. And for Gérard Garouste, "the other is very important". Today he is convinced of this: "My role as a 76-year-old man is to quickly pass on what I believe I have understood to be positive in this short life. I speak to the younger people and I love that. You don't tell stories to yourself, you tell them to others.