Meditating with Léon Gischia (1903-1991)

The young man enters in silence. At the invitation of his uncle, an archaeologist, he agreed to come and discover with him the power of an essential monument of Romanesque art. In the immense nave of the abbey of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe (Vienna), Léon Gischia looks up towards the 11th century barrel vault, covered with murals illustrating numerous scenes from the Old Testament. In a captivating swirl of ocher, orange and white, this large open book speaks of these primordial geneses, these essential exoduses which made us become what we are. Some forty years later, the young man has retained his initial wonder.

Having become a renowned painter after the war, collaborating in particular with Jean Vilar to create the sets for his theater, Gischia entered the last phase of his personal quest. His primary figurative art has become refined over the years and now gives way to the simplest abstraction. That of the inner evidence to which the Romanesque vault of his youth had initiated him. All that remains for him now is the play, full of life, of geometric shapes in perpetual movement. The original ocher, orange and white have been transformed into more intense colors. The gaze is put into action without forcing anything, in silence. We are brought back to other geneses, other exoduses in the making. The title of the work perhaps evokes this: it holds us in the barrel vault of our existence to contemplate, far below, the tumult of life. The circulation of passions. The energy of our inner turbulence. The contagious force of the encounter, always repeated.