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René Girot Venice, 1979

The painter René Girot was born in the South of France. He lives and works in the Midi and Paris.

In 1974, he painted realistic works depicting fragments of women's bodies. The artist began exhibiting at the Salon de Toulon,
where he was a 1975 prizewinner.

From 1976 to 1978, Girot evoked fabrics juxtaposed to human bodies, which subsequently cover them. Finally, the fabrics became the sole element of the painting : his fabrics with a human shape. ("Les Figurants", The Bystanders, Alinea Gallery, Toulon, 1978).

Beaches began to figure in the artist's works, finally occupying
the entire painting. Works became devoid of all human presence.

From 1979 to 1981, his topics were skies, seas and roots
(Exhibit at the Châteauvallon Meeting Center, 1979).

Concurrently, Girot produced a series of drawings depicting fabrics,
a woman with a mask, folds of skin, the canapé.

In 1982, Girot turned to landscapes of rocks and terrains of
an indeterminate scale, within a frequently non-centered composition
in which the elements fit together like the pieces of a puzzle.

A Girot painting (65x105 inches) was purchased in 1983 by the Provence, Alps, Côte d'Azur Cultural Office, where it is on display.

The art critic Alin Avila wrote : "Girot's vision is sharpening (...) His touch is a vivid spear; tones are bold, based on a cool mass
of bright blues, primary blues, cyanides and cerulean.
Beside them, even the flaming brazier of blood, fire and life
is not quieted. Reds and blues remain in tension
until the plastic space is torn apart and opens onto the painting.
Our gaze is freed from the topology of the soil.
We penetrate its fibres and go beyond its context.
The painting then acts, and acts on us."

1986 saw a series of small paintings with sky and terrain in a diptych.

From 1985 to 1989, he travelled to cities where art and life vibrate together : Amsterdam and The Hague; Madrid and Toledo; Athens and ancient Greece; Venice, Florence and Tuscany; Brussels and Ghant; Seville, Cordoba and Granada; Istanbul; Marrakesh; London; Rome and Genoa...

In 1987, the artist enriched his pictorial material, returning to large formats and presenting the landscape by means of a background obtained by successive drippings.

"I question the landscape.
Occasionally, it replies. Then we get moving.
We splatter and splash, we rub and smear ourselves with color.
Then we look at each other. Sometimes, we're pleased.
We have a rather difficult relationship, alternating between tender
and conflicting. We make our path together."

In November 1988, the theme was a luxuriant Mediterranean garden.
He also realized two series of thirty oil-paintings
of nudes on paper : the quick absorption of the color by the paper
made it possible to encase some evidence from the painter's studio.

In August 1989, the "Agdal" series was realized : twelve 46x35 in. paintings, forty drawings and four etchings.

In 1990, René Girot painted jets of water.

"René Girot makes the elements vibrate like colours.
He plunges to nature's heart in southern France's Provence region
where he was born. He studies that heart's internal structure passionately and listens to its faintest murmurs.

He scrutinizes Provence's moors as patiently as a geologist,
gazes at the wave's foam as uneasily as a seaman,
and at the clouds as uncertainly as a weather forecaster.

His art, in its unending gestation, rumbles like the earth's entrails.

The clouds wed the waves and weird roots recall psychoanalysis of the subconscious.

Under Girot's brush, life's forces explode surprisingly in a veritable festival for the eyes.

Girot opens up new horizons to landscape painting."

(Martine Bernard, in "Le Serment des Horaces" n°3, 1989)

In 1991, the "Jardins articulés" : where several landscapes are nested like storeys on the same canvas.

From 1992 to 1998, the same idea has been used on canvases of 33 cm squared, each one being as it were a fragment of landscape (the human body also acting as landscape) which can be turned and arranged together with other paintings to form different pictures.

The "C.V.S. program" (Ciel-Végétal-Sol or Sky-Vegetation-Soil) started in 1996. Here the three expanses are placed on the same vertical plane in a format whose height is twice as long as its width.

... (René Girot) observes the slightest rustle of the world which surrounds him, to order the nature in a very personal way... From experiments to experiments, he interrogates the landscape, continuously, to seize with it the nuances...

(L.L., in "E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs", Editions Gründ, 1999, tome 6, page 186)

In 2000, 2001 and 2002, "Visages d'Afrique"(Faces of African women).