Pere de Ribot en Giverny (2023)
Everything is white. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. The atmosphere is that of a museum. Aseptic air, softened only by the paintings on the walls. The hall is in the Musée de l’Orangerie. The city is Paris. The paintings staring at us are the Nymphéas, the water lilies by Monet, the impressionist painter. Monet painted them towards the end of his life when impressionism was no longer in the artistic avantgarde. The old painter himself was a remainder from another period. The 20th century was violently barging in, with a world war, social instability, technological disruption and several war conflicts that would contribute to that first international war.
Repose is typical of old age. Time is lived more slowly, worries from youth are something distant. One’s perspective becomes more and more contemplative and, for certain, more sensitive characters, a genuine fascination arises for the world that surrounds us. We are far from the time of subversion and artistic expression. Everything seems special – every flower, every river, every mountain, every new season. The landscape becomes an object that shrouds and contains the great mysteries of existence. A boundless delight.
In response to the worldly noise, Monet retreated in his quiet dwelling in Giverny, far from Paris – a house surrounded by ponds, flowers, water lilies and a lush vegetation, alive, full of murmurs. A peaceful, domestic haven. That house is the birthplace of the famous water lilies and paintings that today decorate the walls of L’Orangerie and the Marmottan museum. Largescale canvases, immersive and harmonious, with a touch of Japanese influence.
Monet decided that those latest creations did not belong to him, but to humankind. So in a time of war and violence, Monet decided to donate his paintings to his contemporaries and to posterity. He wanted to transmit the peace and quiet of his paintings and his garden in Giverny to the whole world, thus suffocating the bad passions and bloodthirstiness that ran rampant in 1918.
It is worth mentioning that the gesture was underappreciated – Monet belonged to a past that was dead and buried, he was dubbed ringard, old fashioned, and did not belong to the world of automobiles and electricity. Nothing was more harmless than a landscape versus the futurist icons of speed and the heyday of machines. He was paid barely any attention, and the gesture was buried beneath the repeated crisis in international geopolitics. And yet, here are those magnificent paintings, the “Sistine chapel of impressionism”, according to André Masson, bequeathed by the artist, which ooze beauty through and through. Sacré Monet!
According to Christian theology, one of the means to reach God is via pulchritudinis. In other words, observing and admiring beauty is what brings us to God and proves his existence. That is the reason why, throughout history, figureless landscapes or still life paintings have had a religious, metaphysical connotation. The subject matter of said paintings is not what appears in them so much as the mystery of what one cannot see or figure out in the painting. This mystery is, and has been, a way to talk about God. Through his absence, it becomes a Derridaesque divine footprint. Chesterton expresses himself in a similar way when he says that "the arts exist to awaken and keep alive the sense of the marvelous in man" Beauty is the trace of something higher, which can even lead us to nostalgic and melancholic states.
Landscape is a genre closely related to divine mystery. Academicism has always shown a preference towards technical sophistry, mannerism and human topics – the portrait, the historical painting. A series of genres which stood at the peak of pictorial art. It is not a coincidence that the landscape, the exclusion of the human figure, the contemplation of nature, were seen as something less dignified or spectacular, due to its simplicity, obviousness or lack of ambition. But it is precisely that simplicity, that nonchalance towards humanity and its naivety, the lack of “self” in the painting, what makes it a truly pure genre.
Pere de Ribot is a landscape artist and a sensitive man. A seeker of beauty, he is aware that this is a means to contact with and participate in creating the world. Man is the only creature whose duty is not only to inhabit the earth, but to relish it and make it a better place – for example, by acknowledging the sublimity of existence through aesthetic creation, using the latter as a crystallisation of the meaning of life.
Zola, close friend of Monet, famously said that impressionism is reality seen through a temperament. Getting inside a painting by Pere means getting inside a landscape and getting inside a world (as Napoleon said about Jacques Louis David’s famous work, ‘ce tableau, on y peut presque marcher dedans’). Getting inside sensitivity.
His painting is both local and universal, almost a lanscape diagram that the viewer updates and makes his own, projecting the spaces he knows and has lived. Wide and vast steppes, seas and skies, coral floors, distant horizons, swaying shapes that are never defined. Oneiric imagination, Mediterranean hedonism or tropical sensuality. The colour and the landscape shape and express what Pere paints. He gives us the sketch, the gestures, the force vector that conveys and arranges his paintings. He gives us a composition, some guidelines that help us observe with him.
Every artists does not consider a work finished until it finally breathes in balance and harmony. Until all the forces dwelling on the canvas have been captured and represented, with properly adjusted and placed lines of intensity and emotion. The result of that disorder called artistic creation is the painting. A creation that, in Pere’s case, is also a prayer, a dialogue with a transcendent entity, with a commanding God who offers a sight for us to enjoy. This is the pleasure of painting, of contemplative life or of prayer: to achieve a syntony with the thick silence of dialogue with divinity. It is a score settling with life in which the scale always tips towards flattery. The artist is that final brushstroke, delicate and simple, who admits to being part of the landscape himself, a spectator, ultimately enjoying the greatest wonder of all – the beauty of creation.
As Monet guessed, landscape is one of the purest gifts that can be offered to humankind, for as the ancient Latins knew, man can only be happy so long as he is surrounded by nature – he was created for it.
The artist gathers his paintbrushes alone in his studio, gets ready to wash them and arranges the materials after a creative session. The communication has been cut, but in him lingers a haven of peace, an awareness of having been close to something grand, beautiful and important. He silently picks up his tools, washes his hands, looks around, turns the lights off, and goes outside. The smell of paint thinner is intense, but he can’t even smell it anymore. There is a blue stain on his white trousers. The day is about to end, the fragile light is fading. He walks into the garden and finds himself in the middle of the meadow, happy, caressed by the soft breeze of the Empordà. The blossomed poppy fields seem like a red dripping on the greenness of the plants. God is, above all, a great artist. The thought amuses him. A couple of ducks have landed by the pool and stay there all day. How nice it is here, he thinks, remembering the quote from the Gospel. And he takes a puff from his electronic cigarette, with a satisfied smile on his lips. Everything is in balance, once again.
Àlex Reig.
Writer