Pierre BRISSSET, art critic, Revue OEIL

 

From Nicolas De STAËL to Francis Bacon via Pollock and Vieira Da Silva, there is no modern or contemporary painter, among the greatest, whom he does not admire or have admired to some extent.

 

And yet we would search in vain in the work of Georges Nadra for the slightest trace, the smallest indication of the influence of Bacon and if we can happen to discover in certain of his paintings some distant kinship with De Staël, Vieira Da Silva, Szenes, this great "little master" who has now disappeared, or other stars of lyrical abstraction from the 1950s, Georges Nadra would know despite these deceptive appearances very quickly acquire his own personality and no longer be just himself.

 

Manage to remain or become oneself by knowing how to forget, more or less consciously, one's models and one's masters and with remarkable grace, knowing how to keep only the substantive marrow of the teaching received at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

 

Torn between two cultures, Nadra, without ever denying his origins, on the contrary knew how to remember them and draw inspiration from them to closely unite the East and the West. Enriching himself with their contrasts, he manages to mix in his work on canvas and on paper the same subtlety, the same oriental refinement, all in "mixed technique", oils, acrylics, aerosols, collages, wood fibers or earthenware. dust... The painting of a world in formation where the air and the earth, in search of their identity, try in the softness or the violence of the brush to tear themselves away from each other, to detach themselves from each other. others to organize themselves and become landscapes where, in an auroral light without heat, ochres and browns, blues, grays of all shades sometimes tinted with imponderable pinks or scratched with sanguine become stratified rocks with vertiginous walls, fleeing sands in pursuit of the horizon, tumultuous seas with stunning hollows or immense skies swept by capricious clouds.

 

“It is the viewers who make the paintings,” wrote Marcel Duchamp somewhere. No doubt, but we still have to learn to look. Know how to look.

 

More than any other, perhaps, the work of this artist demands, demands such an approach, such a laudable effort. Look at her; and by knowing how to look at it, you will then discover, but only then, all the difficult, the secret, the mysterious beauty of a painting which can only be revealed and delivered to those who have truly deserved it.

 

This is true, authentic beauty!

 

Pierre BRISSET

April 2, 1991