Page 35 - Studio International - December 1965

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turns its face towards us.
It is possible that the conquest of another pictorial
world seems to Piaubert like the possession of the
darknesses by his vision; it is from the mystery of the
original chaos that his eye has to extract the signs he will
enclose in the rectangle of the painting to subject them
to his own language. His procedure is equivalent in a
certain measure to intuition. an exploration of the
unconcious. You will believe yourself walking in one
of your dreams if you advance in the twilight where
phantoms assemble in the sleeping air. where they
acquire suddenly a weight, a form. a living presence.
The visionary world of Piaubert is a taming of the
savage poetry of still uninhabited spaces.
One would like without doubt to learn that after
having completed his classes as a student painter at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Bordeaux one of the least
artistic towns of France. Piaubert worked with the great
couturier Poiret who liked to surround himself with
painters and who was one of the great patrons of the
epoch of 1925-30 when Joseph Delteil wrote 'The
false Gods fell in the dust.' The false Gods of Piaubert
counselled him in a painting. solidly constructed with
harmonies rather sombre, which was not in other
respects without merit but which found itself devoid
of all originality and 'personality'. The day when cutting
out a piece of one of his canvasses 'Le Coteau gris' he
perceived that in this particle detached from the whole,
there was another whole. He became conscious of the
'abstraction' contained in nature and catalogued with
passion this revealed mystery. His work henceforth
developed between the colour and the form. the mark
and the material where opposing influences converged
and where at other times the abstraction, the discipline,
imposed their demands.
The painter will often give the impression of being
restrained behind the qualification of 'abstract' and it
is true that if one holds strictly to semantics the label of
'symbolist' would fit him better if it were laden with
all the bizarre souvenirs of the end of the last century.
The logical interpreter of the life of the species,
Piaubert provides us with a continuous universe from
its pre-formation to its destruction of which the
hallucinatory life acquires a reality that imposes this
surprising truth: before his pictures, men dare no longer
look behind him. How many exhibitions has he made?
It matters little, since they demand it, he goes and
shows some particles of his dreams. He has just shown
at Barcelona, at Le Havre and at Nantes and will
continue next spring at the Galerie Stadler in Paris.
He has illustrated with lithographs the pathetic Sonnets
composed in secret by Jean Cassou and the texts or
the poems from Luc Berimont, Pierre Seghers, Rene­
devined spaces presented by that interior eye which one Guy Cadou, Claude Aveline, Saint John Perse and
knows for the ancient role that it plays in Asiatic Michel Tapie. He has also carried out eight decors for
religions and in western occultism. La Creation du Monde of Darius Milhaud at the
In a canvas of Piaubert the silence is made for the Theatre of Heidelberg.
same reasons that have brought about the presence of I regard the recent works of Piaubert, chiefly those of
the invisible. It does not close the vision in bringing out the summer and the last winter, the 'Metachronismes'
an image which will delight but it appears on the erected like millenary cities wrought from the sands of
contrary. as the origin of a new cycle of powers accorded which the waves are fixed in their very matter. Spell­
a profound existence in restoring it to the very principles binding phantoms on which the eye, star of our cryptic
of painting. With him it returns to what it should never individual, sun or knuckle end, is placed as the zero
have ceased to be: the art of a water diviner. It of sight and of feeling, the carbuncle of the night. From
attempts to pierce all the possible worlds down to the where comes this brown lava mixed to the floods of
secret of their substance. it brings about the sidereal blood which occasionally transforms itself into immac­
kingdoms where beauty awakens before life. where one ulate snow?
sees that life tearing itself away from beauty before it I imagine Piaubert at the heart of this world at a time
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