'The Restless', by Gérard Garouste: the cursed artist who built an improbable career despite his mental illness

Gérard Garouste (Paris, 1946) is a visual artist: his work has been exhibited in Berlin, Paris and New York and can currently be seen in such important places as the Évry Cathedral, the Elysée Palace and the Châtelet Opera House. That he is recognized as one of the most radically original painters of the 20th century – and distinguished with individual exhibitions in important places such as the Cartier Foundation, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Pompidou Center – borders on a miracle, and this is because Two reasons. The first, his social class, which at that time—and even more so today—determined that people like him, without personal ties or obvious affiliations, had no right to aspire to an artistic career. The second reason, mental illness. One summer day, he left his pregnant wife at a friends' house and took a train to Paris, where he settled into the Ritz with the money he had stolen from his parents and vandalized a room. He was convinced that he should have a talk with a priest. Since he didn't find any, he headed to a bar. He ended up in the Villejuif psychiatric hospital.

“I lived that time as a trip through a foreign land,” he remembers. During his internment, Garouste managed to escape on several occasions; on one occasion, naked. He spent the next 10 years mired in an unproductive depression from which two, again, exceptional events brought him out. The first was the request that he decorate a new nightclub in Paris that would become the famous Le Palace. The second seems even more implausible: before even seeing his work, the American gallery owner Leo Castelli, one of the greatest dealers of the second half of the 20th century, decided to represent him. But Garouste's visual work is too anchored in his personal history and his influences—Dante, the Torah, Cervantes, the Talmud...— and is excessively jealous of his secrets to be relevant in “a weak age, drunk on television, money and

performances”;

Furthermore, it is not so abundant that its creator could aspire to be among the most sought-after contemporary artists. Worse: the psychotic episodes continued to occur, and Garouste, like most people who suffer from a psychiatric disorder, lives in constant fear of breaking down again. The last time he was admitted to the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. They gave him the room that belonged to the philosopher Louis Althusser.

“The words to refer to me have varied depending on the era: they have called me manic depressive or bipolar… A century earlier, they would have simply described me as crazy”

“The words to refer to me have varied depending on the era: they have called me manic depressive or bipolar… A century earlier, they would have simply described me as crazy,” he says. More and more frequently, the disappearance or end of the period of greatest activity of the

baby boomer

generation confronts us with stories like

El innquilo,

which close a trajectory and reflect an era. There is no reason to aesthetically evaluate what is a simple demographic issue. But the interesting thing about this very good book is that it expresses a paradigm shift. “I came out of nowhere. My family gnawed at the bones of dark taboos. School had not opened any path for me. They had not transmitted anything to me,” recalls the author. Far from complaining, from allowing himself and others to see him as a victim, the survivor of a trauma or disorder, Garouste, created. Only when he paints, he says, does he have the feeling of having “understood” and “done something” with his life. The end of his generation will confront us less and less—in fact, he already does—with that attitude, that of creating beauty starting from the deepest ugliness and making use of it.

The restless Self-portrait of a painter, of a son, of a madman

Gérard Garouste and Judith Perrignon

Translation by Iballa López Hernández

Errata Naturae, 2024

192 pages. 19.50 euros

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