Translated by Bethszabee Garner

In this interview, Gérard Garouste opens up without restraint, with the elegance and finesse that characterize both the man and his work.

Yves Derai: The Centre Georges Pompidou is currently exhibiting your works as part of a fascinating retrospective. What artistic approach guided this work?

Gérard Garouste: My teachers served as my guiding thread. I first wanted to highlight Dante's Divine Comedy, which greatly inspired my early work. Then Rabelais, who almost disappeared under the Inquisition. Next, we move on to Cervantes, a Marrano whom I read intensely. In a small room, you can also see Esther's Megillah, which was a commission. Now I'm focusing on Jewish studies and the Kabbalah, which are an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

Yves Derai: The contemporary art world hasn't always been kind to you. Is this prestigious exhibition a fair turnaround?

G.G.: I find it quite logical. When I left art school, conceptual art was all the rage, with artists from the generation of my older brother, such as Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. We were coming out of the era of Picasso and Matisse, iconoclasts whom I loved very much. I was also very impressed by Marcel Duchamp's interviews with Pierre Cabanne. As someone who loved painting and drawing, it was a kick in the stomach.

Yves Derai: Why?

G.G.: Because of his intellectual attitude, not his work as a visual artist, because that was something else entirely. The Duchamps were a family of artists, but that didn't stop him from saying that the artist is not the one who makes the work, but the one who looks at it. That broke everything. I had a hard time during that period, but I was reassured by the philosopher Roland Barthes.

Yves Derai: Ah? Why?

G.G.: Well, he made it possible to return to painting for its own sake, despite the emergence of photography. In short, he said that painting someone's portrait brought something more than a photograph. It was an opening that went beyond the world of form. I also liked what he said about language: if you take a word from the dictionary, he said, you see that it is defined by about fifty other words. So you have to look up the definitions of the 50 words to understand the first word. You can read the entire dictionary without ever finding the definition of a single word. Roland Barthes added that it is from this loop that the writer can create.

Yves Derai: And did you like it?

G.G.: Enormously. It's the same in art. From the prehistoric drawings in the Chauvet cave to Marcel Duchamp's urinal, the circle is complete. We could therefore begin a new artistic period in which form regained its rights.

Yves Derai: What was your relationship with this conceptual art at the time, given that you defended a figurative vision?

G.G.: Faced with Duchamp's intellectual stance, I asked myself: what am I going to do with my hands? It worried me all the more because I've always had more confidence in my hands than in my head! After this tabula rasa, it was necessary to start all over again.

Yves Derai: And so start again with figurative art?

G.G.: Careful, I wasn't trying to be amnesiac. There was no question of despising conceptual artists. I love Yves Klein's work, but when he demolishes the figurative artists of his time, we don't care. That discourse is outdated. In fact, one gets the feeling that for conceptual artists, the discourse underlying the work is at least as important as the work itself, if not more so.

Yves Derai: Not for you.

G.G.: Indeed, we've seen a lot of uninteresting works covered with quotes from trendy philosophers, for example... I find that very pretentious. I've gone back to basics, dealing in my own way with subjects such as mythology, the sacred, landscapes, nudes... This corresponds to the first part of the exhibition. Then I continued to live my life, underwent psychoanalysis, became interested in Judaism, and began to paint what I was experiencing.

Yves Derai: When did you gain recognition in your field?

G.G.: In the 1980s, I found the art world very snobbish. The exhibitions and biennials, to which I wasn't invited, seemed artificial to me. At the time, I was living in my sets, like at the Palace, where Andy Warhol and others who preferred that place to galleries would go. In the contemporary art world, there was no humor, we were bored with vague discourse, while at the Palace, people were having a blast, dancing like gods.

Yves Derai: Yet these cliques that looked down on you would change their minds.

G.G.: Yes, from the moment I exhibited at Leo Castelli's in the United States. All of a sudden, I was in the biggest gallery in the world. So people had to look at my painting differently.

Yves Derai: How did things end between you?

G.G.: There was a big exhibition in Germany where all the important artists of my generation, such as Baselitz and Kiefer, were present, but not a single French artist. Castelli called me and said, “Are you happy to be there? Did they give you a good room?” Very surprised, I replied, “Leo, I wasn't invited.” “Yes, you were,” he said, “they just haven't come to see you yet, but you're there.” I hung up with Leo and a few moments later, I got a call from the two curators of the exhibition asking to meet me. I welcomed them to my studio. They barely looked at the paintings and offered me a place in the exhibition. That was the influence of Leo Castelli. Today, the same thing exists: politics and big money are still just as important. The difference is that Leo Castelli was a talent scout. He revealed a whole host of young American artists, particularly from the expressionist movement, such as Jackson Pollock. We in France were left behind.

Yves Derai: What is the difference between that era and ours?

G.G.: Today, it's not just Europe facing America. There are Russians, Chinese, Japanese. Globalization has also arrived in art. In France, we still have beautiful artists, but they are not necessarily known internationally.

Yves Derai: Is street art renewing contemporary art?

G.G.: No, I don't think so. As I'm not a historian, let's say I'm not sensitive to it. But I don't like the Boticelli period, for example, even though it's highly regarded.

Yves Derai: Isn't your work confined to the “figurative” label? When we look at your retrospective, we see that some of your paintings evoke the Surrealists, or even abstraction.

G.G.: I am above all a visual artist who tells stories. The paradox is that the stories themselves are irrelevant; my priority is the thinking of my masters. When I paint the Magi from the Talmud, I am telling their story, but the Talmud is also a psychoanalysis of the text. It is this interpretation that interests me.

Yves Derai: Today, do you need to be well versed in Jewish studies to understand Garouste's painting?

G.G.: No. A painting is silent. And if you had to know everything that goes on in my head to come and see my work, there wouldn't be many people!

Yves Derai: Why did you publish an autobiography ?  To express what's in your head?

G.G.: It was commissioned by the publisher. I agreed on condition that we write it together. He suggested that I co-author the book with Judith Perrignon, whose portraits I had seen in Libération. She didn't know much about contemporary art, but she did a great job. Rereading what she wrote about me was very moving.

Yves Derai: In L'Intranquille, you reveal your bouts of delirium, while asserting that art and madness do not mix, contrary to popular belief.

G.G.: It's a cliché, indeed, to say that a good artist is crazy. Van Gogh is often used to support this thesis, but if Van Gogh had had access to the medications that exist today, he would undoubtedly have been more prolific. It's a bourgeois view of art. Some people even think that artists should not seek psychoanalysis, believing that it will destroy their creative drive! In reality, illness is a terrible handicap.

Yves Derai: Why did you choose to recount these painful episodes? Was it part of your therapy?

G.G.: No, no, I didn't want to hide anything. I also wanted to demystify these problems and explain the life-saving role of the medication my psychiatrist gives me. In the same way, I wanted my children to know what role my father played during World War II. I wanted to be sincere and transparent.

Yves Derai: How do you feel about the value of your works?

G.G.: As long as everything is going well and I can pay my taxes, I don't care about the rest. The art market is nothing. Prices go up and down because a patron, a journalist, or an agent gets excited about this or that.

Yves Derai: Unlike Jeff Koons, you don't say that value defines art?

G.G.: Jeff Koons has a great sense of humor. He plays with the art market. What interests me happens in the studio. Painting raises questions. I like the staging of absence that exists in all exhibitions. Between two paintings, there is always a space where a third painting could have been hung. That's what we should be talking about. It's called zeugma. It's a Greek word that has entered the French language and means “the absence of a bridge” in philosophy.

Yves Derai: Can you elaborate on zeugma?

G.G.: If we take the example of a joke, it's not what is said that is funny, but what is left unsaid. If you need to explain a joke, it's either not funny or it's been badly told.

Yves Derai: Do you consider this retrospective to be a culmination?

G.G.: Not at all. I intend to tackle the themes I'm currently studying, particularly the Hasidic world [an Orthodox Jewish movement], which has been completely overlooked. That's my project.

Article written by Yves Derai to be found in issue n°2 of OniriQ Magazine.