Gérard Garouste, painter: "Everything I have achieved in life has been thanks to my fragility"

Although he spends half a year in his studio in Normandy, we have met at his house in Paris.

It was designed by his wife, the decorator Elizabeth Garouste.

There she is portrayed.

But she prefers that the interview be between the canvases of his exhibited at the Pompidou Center until the beginning of January.

It's Tuesday, closing day.

The rooms are empty, and Garouste, her fears and her obsessions multiply on the walls.

There she is painted the gun that her father took out to threaten her mother and then left on a table.

Also Don Quixote's ability to see beauty in ugliness.

And also the workshops of La Source, an organization that introduces children with problems to art.

"The goal is not to train artists, but to discover art as a cure," she says.

She knows what she's talking about.

L'intranquile [The restless, which Errata Naturae translates into Spanish] is the title of his memoirs.

Where did that restlessness come from?

As a title, de Pessoa.

But it sums up my character: psychological difficulties to live, delusions and, although I have managed to have a life, I have been left with the need to live pending the slightest sign that my head is going away, restless.

I have to avoid the jubilation.

Crises have made me a prudent man.

My life without the drugs would be impossible to bear.

In return, I have known calm.

When did you have the last crisis?

Five years ago.

We were going on a trip.

I fear enthusiasm.

And my wife more.

I start to talk a lot and I see in her face what is coming.

So we act.

The psychiatrist told him what medication to give me and the next day he was devastated, but the delirium was gone.

His work is that of a passionate man, someone who never stops analyzing and remembering.

How do you combine that search with calm?

I believe that calm comes with the experience of life.

For 30 years I psychoanalyzed myself.

A psychoanalysis is not a dialogue, it is a monologue with oneself.

And in the end I lost my fear.

Today I am not afraid of anything.

I have no secrets either.

I think I'm free.

Gérard Garouste, pictured at his home in Paris.

In this conversation he talks about Modiano and Cervantes, and also about Tintoretto and Duchamp.Ed Alcock

Has painting, writing, studying or psychoanalyzing healed you?

It's all the same: talk.

You free yourself by talking.

Who knows how to speak does not need to shout.

One is aware of what he comes to say.

To speak is to order the head.

He had his first big crisis when his wife was pregnant with their son Guillaume.

I painted that delirium.

I became obsessed with the book

, by Carlos Castaneda.

I took Elizabeth for the devil.

In his autobiography, he wonders how she has been able to stay with you for so many years.

Have you found an answer?

It's call love.

But it's amazing, of course.

All our friends recommended that he leave me.

But she stayed.

Her attitude leaves me speechless.

Even today.

Who stays next to a madman?

When I've been down, I've been unable to assume my love for her.

She, on the other hand, has always been capable of anything.

When we didn't have money, she worked in her parents' shoe store.

And she wouldn't let me down.

Elizabeth's favorite painting is of a man walking with a cane across a scorched field.

Have you asked why?

No. Because I know.

She just wanted her to go back to painting.

And I spent the day sleeping.

Those who sleep during the day have a horrible life.

It's hard not being able to be a person.

I painted it after spending a decade living as a vegetable.

I tried to paint, but I would lie down at the foot of the easel and go to sleep, like a cat.

Why?

It was an uncomfortable place and I thought that I would not fall asleep there.

Then I realized that the medication was too strong.

My current psychiatrist said they cured me by shutting me down so I wouldn't bother.

They corrected the medication and I painted that journey through the charred field.

Is delirium an escape?

Sure, you become a dropout when life is too hard for you.

After the first serious one, they admitted me.

I had risked, not just my life, but that of others.

I threatened everyone: my wife, some priests...

Have you benefited from delusion?

It is paradoxical, but I found a profession that could live with my delusions.

It's like when one breaks their arm and learns to write with the other.

A slightly crazy painter is permissible.

Can you imagine that he would have been a doctor?

No one would have trusted me.

Being crazy allows you to play.

The question is what to play with.

He has spent part of his life rethinking the figure of his father.

He has seen him as a psychopath who threatened to kill his mother.

Yes, it's in that box [points to it].

The term was told to me by a psychiatrist when I described his way of acting.

However, he wrote that towards the end of his life he realized that they loved each other.

So is.

Like so many things in life, it is paradoxical.

I have also realized that my parents loved me.

In their own way.

But, at the same time, they hurt each other.

Each one in their own way, by action or omission.

The restless

One important thing was when I found out that he, during World War II, had looted the belongings of the Jews.

I felt responsible for something that he had not done, but he was associated with my name.

Today I don't feel guilty.

But I feel ashamed.

Before accepting the distance from his father, he tried to talk to him.

Everything can be accepted on condition of speaking about it.

Talking is the key.

But my father never did.

He never wanted.

That taught me to talk to my children.

Have you witnessed the ups and downs of your life?

They couldn't choose.

They were there.

Elizabeth talked to them.

to read

.

For them, the big

came then.

They adored their grandfather.

People are complex.

And that is what ended up making me passionate about Judaism, which investigates that complexity instead of denying it.

He defends doubt as freedom and the need not to hide things.

Both things are vital.

Lies are painful for those who use them and for those who receive them.

Your book has ended up on the psychiatrists table.

Mine has never wanted to read it.

But many recommend it.

I have been invited a few times to psychiatry conferences.

[Series].

They consider it encouraging for patients to see how one can live with such a disease.

I am manic depressive.

But one adjusts.

Gérard Garouste, at his home in Paris.

A man of art who designed a disco. Ed Alcock

At some point, her parents realized that she would be better off without them.

And they gave me life.

At the boarding school I met those who are my great friends today: Patrick Modiano, Jean-Michel Ribes.

Modiano described the school "for ill-loved little ones, bastards and lost children."

Was it a lost child?

My parents loved me.

Although it took me a while to understand.

He was dyslexic and generated ridicule among his classmates.

Until they saw how he drew.

A psychologist recommended an internship.

My father did not want to because he had had a bad time in one.

But the world opened up to me.

How do you learn to live being so fragile?

We all have a degree of fragility.

Wealth is obtained by going to the depth of that fragility.

This is how I work: one can feed on his own fragility.

I think that everything I have achieved in life has been thanks to my fragility.

Problems either kill you or strengthen you.

He began painting when many artists considered that the time for painting had passed.

What to do after Marcel Duchamp? A guy who put a urinal in a gallery, called it a Fountain and mislocated it and turned it into art.

What he did was transfer the artistic authorship of the one who does things (he had not made the urinal) to the one who thinks them.

In the 20th century, works of art were not painted, they were thought.

The artistic avant-garde has always needed to deny the above, to overcome it, to contradict it.

The history of art is like ludo, you advance little by little and when you take a risk you can advance further, end up in prison or return to the starting square.

Duchamp is a return to square one.

And where are you?

The typical French painter who returned from his trip to Italy with art history in his head was Poussin.

He had the technique in his head.

He knew how to paint heat.

I have wanted to follow that line of knowing the rules of the game to be able to skip them.

I have found confidence in this profession in myself.

In my feelings, in what it transforms me.

The vanguard is a battle.

And I took her inside.

Jean Dubuffet toured psychiatric hospitals to get closer to how the sick painted.

He did the opposite of what I did.

He sought to paint the deformation that others saw.

Duchamp hated the academy, but he made the discourse build the work.

Like impressionism, expressionism, pointillism or fauvism..., all schools were the same: standards.

And that was exactly what I wanted to overcome.

He did figuration in conceptual times.

I wanted to paint what we don't say.

Painting is an awareness.

It makes the unconscious conscious.

If something touches you when you see it, it is because our unconscious has been related.

That's magical.

The French artist Gérard Garouste, pictured at his home in Paris.Ed Alcock

He began to earn a living with set designs for his fellow boarding school Jean-Michel Ribes.

He paid little.

I had to work as a delivery boy for my father's furniture store.

During that time I was neither an artist nor a madman.

I lived in a nightmare.

From there he went on to decorate Le Palace, the most famous nightclub in Paris in the eighties.

Fabrice Emaer, its owner, was an extraordinary person.

He gave me the opportunity of my life.

A guy like you, who needs to be calm and avoid passions, goes to work in a nightclub.

It seems like a joke.

She worked when the disco closed and she knew that he could not drink alcohol or take drugs.

She was terrified of them.

Have you never sought another escape from your ghosts than painting?

More than an escape, painting has protected me.

Since childhood, when I earned the respect of my peers.

Gallerist Leo Castelli gave his work recognition that the Pompidou denied him.

I had a first exhibition in New York.

And the director of the Pompidou went to see her to say that I did not represent French art.

It seems like a revenge that it returns now, 40 years later.

Yes!

Another paradox.

The criticism was devastating.

But Castelli said: "We'll see in 15 years."

Castelli multiplied its price by 10.

Thanks to him we bought our house in Normandy, and Elizabeth was able to quit her job at her parents' shoe store and dedicate herself to her own business: design.

Castelli asked him to produce more.

But I don't know how to do it.

The only luxury the artist needs is time.

How did you manage to stay out of the current art production machinery?

I love painting.

He could never have been a conceptual artist.

I search and search for myself in Tintoretto, in De Chirico and in the thought of Roland Barthes, who opened my eyes to trust what cannot be counted.

A madman is not someone who has lost his mind.

He is someone who has lost everything except his head.

Chesterton said it, a writer, not a psychoanalyst.

And I have lived it.

When you're delirious, everything fits.

The reasoning seems unequivocal.

And instead you are completely out of any reason.

The study has saved him.

And the doubt.

Through knowledge, one comes to freedom.

He claims to have washed his brain with the

There is darkness, torture and metaphors.

Also in

, in which he hid the deep truths behind unreason and humor.

For many specialists in Hebrew history, it is evident that Don Quixote was a pig, a Jew forced to convert to Christianity and to practice his religion in a hidden way.

Judaism, unlike Catholicism, never arrives at definitive truths.

It is the discussion that opens the mind, that allows us to grow.

The Bible does not seek to evangelize, it seeks to make men doubt.

He has been tracing his path thanks to studying and facing his fears with the decision to never search for an absolute truth.

People who believe they are in possession of the truth suffer the wrath of the gods.

Think of the fascists: they think they are right.

They have banished the slightest doubt, and intelligence, without doubt, could not develop.

Did he convert to Judaism to make up for the pillaging his father had perpetrated?

No. It is true that it weighs on me like a stone.

And at the same time I don't give a damn because by assuming it I downplayed it.

But what he decided for me was that when I consulted the rabbi about my conversion, he told me that with my children already grown it was too late, that it could be an intimate decision.

Can you imagine?

An intimate conversion, without sacraments?

That freedom shocked me.

I wanted to be close to something that allows you to be so free.

Time passed and our son Oliver and his partner, Naomi —who is Jewish— decided to circumcise his son.

He asked me if I knew any rabbis and I introduced him to Delphine Horvilleur.

He had met her because when

appeared, he phoned me.

She explained the protocol and I decided to convert to Judaism with my grandson.

I am Jewish because of my grandson.

Study, generosity and work.

Those are the keys to Judaism.

The Torah is the study;

avodah, work, and

, generosity, which saves from death.

For the Talmud they are the three pillars on which the world was founded.

Three feet for existence to be stable.

And, of course, all three must be equally long.

In the Middle Ages, even the poorest Jews had to teach their children to read.

Compare it to the rest of the world.

Those who knew how to read could access knowledge and, through it, freedom or wealth.

In the ancient world, only the clergy, aristocrats, and Jews could read.

The best inheritance is knowledge.

Has

In a man who has to make an effort to be calm.

What gives me peace of mind is having accepted myself.

I have not gotten rid of who I have been.

We are not here to win competitions or money.

In that race life escapes.

We have come to win.

It's not about dominating the world, it's about dominating yourself.

If you are strong, you can rule a country.

If you are stronger, you can rule your family.

And if you are truly strong, you manage to rule yourself.

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