Laure GIGOU :
Conservateur Départemental des Musées
    
   

BRAMABIAUI ! A cavern that represents memory for speleologists! As fo me, this name sounds like legend. A poem,with this river BONHEUR tha goes across and through! We allude to the loss of the river BONHEUR and then to its resurgence.These words recall our dreams ...

I especially well understand that this cavern should hav brought a painter his inspiration.But a contemporary painter,why? Is it returning to the sources of inspiration ? Trying to recover what was leading the first men to the first expression of Art? It i an évidence that if the magdalenians seized that space (the cave, essentially), if they wanted to make it theirs, it is because the place offered them special inspiration. Do we retain such fossilized unconsciousness as to lead us to resuming the gestures of those me who were no longer primitive but already highly civilized.

Yes,but Jean TRUEL seized the càve after a slow progres only.

The first times were shy ones. He translated impressions into conventionnal space and medium, the painted canvas.

Then his advancement led to cross over the border of space. His wish was to show his speleologist's sensations in the open air But as the cave is not easily caught by our senses, his contact with the places made him leave the traditionnal frame,and medium

Then came open air wall paintings.

To show in full daylight, in boundless space, the feelings, impressions, visions of a painter of caves. Not only did he free himself of space, but he also went beyond time This paint that peels off, these wooden plates that crumble away, the mineral that is combined, the plants that want to conquer space again, such is the everlasting struggle of art versus eternity

Such, too, the way in which the painter who represents the caves ir his art, gives his painting a wide part ofthose caves. Then we witness the hold the painter has on the cave itself. The stage is over.Sure of himself, of his inspiration, the artist dares to make his own the cavespace, to paint there,to make it into contemporary sanctuary of art in order to follow his ancestors traces; Some places are more favourable than athers, and secret places. Every space is painted and changes into colours to let inspiration ooze.

Now; once the cave has been taken, the painter comes out into daylight a achild out of its mother's, womb. Isn't the cave considered as female? Here,once at this stage, the artist creates and gives birth to new frescoes representing the cavern and the cavern in the cave together with its minerals and rocks. We seem to penetrate a space fitted with mirrors in which our faces are reflected.

Maybe is it primeval artistic inspiration at last regained...