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Pierre Peyrolle is a painter in the margin.  There was hitherto this concept, the image of the misunderstood painter too far ahead of his time, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin.  But the avant-gardes have triumphed, the transgression of pictorial languages and established aesthetics are now standards and the "cursed painters" have entered the museum.  Today, which artist does not claim dadaism and Marcel Duchamp as their source, does not repeat the founding gesture of the inventor of the "objet trouvé", and does not produce works which are simultaneously their own theories? Pierre Peyrolle goes further. He wants to abolish wasted time; he intends to breathe life into the past.  The time wasted is that which is spent by all modern painters disputing the very heart of representation.

The past is that of the great paintings in which representation was asserted boldly.  Peyrolle sees in Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon its last representatives.  His gesture, apparently reactionary, testifies that it is still possible to paint "with a brush in the hand".  Furthermore, what brush: the famous zero of the "series seven" of Windsor and Newton, the weapon of the painting restorers.  Pierre Peyrolle would like to paint like Hyacinthe Rigaud and his skies have the quasi-meteorologic realism of Tiepolo.  But, then, why does he paint nightmares that neither Rigaud nor Tiepolo could have imagined?

The nightmares of Pierre Peyrolle are those of a man who, after having witnessed the appalling spectacle of the twentieth century, with its totalitarianism and the crawling secularisation of the "sacred", takes refuge in a fundamental and final melancholy.  The signs, the symbols, the images with which Pierre Peyrolle populates his paintings (and God knows they are far from being empty) are not claiming roots in any cosmogony. One recognizes only fragments of the Western culture but those, to quote the verse of Stéphane Mallarmé, are not "quiet boulders here fallen from an obscure disaster". The landscapes, which Pierre Peyrolle shows us, belong to an irremediably vanished time.  They do not appear in any live memories, they are not even the evocation of an Arcadia that shepherds could find around a funeral stele inscribed "et ego in arcadia…".  At the time we are looking at his canvasses, the shipwreck is consumed; "Great Painting" has sunk beyond the horizon to be thrown in the abyss from which it will not return.  The power remains to cause emotions, to cause feelings.  The paintings of Pierre Peyrolle could be similar to the objects which were used as a release by the little Proust: the yellow section of a wall or the sonata of Vinteuil, the paving stone shaking in the courtyard of the hotel of Guermantes, suddenly plunging the narrator of "Remembrance" in not a "lost" but a "found" time, relived with an unutterable joy.  Modern figurative painters like Balthus or Morandi excelled in this genre, comparable with a literary style extremely in vogue in the seventeenth century: the "consolatio"; except that Pierre Peyrolle refuses to grant us this comfort.

Similar to the "Vanities" of the great Flemish Masters where, beside profane splendours, brocades, silks and jewels, a skull or a funeral charade always appeared, Peyrolle's paintings move away irremediably as we believe that we are deciphering them.  The pleasure that they offer us is constantly thwarted by the presence of death in filigree.  In this sense, this meticulous figuration which is Pierre Peyrolle's trademark is much more "abstract" than painting of the same name, much more "conceptual" than the empty art of the Masters of the "Nothing".

However, Pierre Peyrolle knows well that he will not resuscitate "Great Painting". His extreme virtuosity, his artistic precision, his eagerness, his perseverance in creating a clinical representation of our civilization, will not return life to Art.
It thus remains for Peyrolle to raise in the distance a haughty and inaccessible mausoleum akin to the "lsland of the Dead" of Arnold Böcklin.  Pierre Peyrolle has already painted three gigantic pictorial comments on thev"Island".  These signals that he sends us from a sinking wreck, Pierre Peyrolle hardly counts that we will perceive them, us, his contemporaries.  The museum curators, the art critics, even the collectors find cumbersome this painting of history, or rather this painting of the end of history.

Peyrolle's precision, his coherence, his laconism, contrast too much with what hangs in galleries today: the blur, the chatter, the undecided.  So, Pierre Peyrolle continues to paint as one commits suicide; or rather as one sacrifices oneself, to raise above the flood of mediocrity an awaiting pedestal.

Pierre Rival