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Plants,
rocks, feeling of nature
As a child and teenager, Pierre Lamalattie spent his holidays in
the Limousin region, on the plate of Millevaches. It rains a great
deal in this region. Brooks and rivers abound. Everything appears
gorged with water. Peat bogs are omnipresent. Lamalettie spent long
periods there, often alone, walking entire days and fishing in the
torrents. His boredom gradually transformed into an attraction for
the abounding and decaying universe, the reddish water, the organic
soils, and the accumulations of moss. He gradually indulged in a
kind of fascination for nature, mixed with a diffuse fear and the
impression of taking part in something wild and enormous. Since
this period, the feeling of nature appears indissociable to him
from a mixture of terror and attraction, of sensuality and chaos.
The simplest things of nature often hide a powerful beauty: some
leaves, a branch, a plant picked up and pressed, but also stones,
a snail shell, small forgotten things. Hence Pierre Lamalattie's
attraction for poverty in art. His painting is transcended by the
desire for retreat in nature, by the inclination for this peace,
this ever so special pleasure which characterizes the hermits. It
has to be said that men are often tiring! They incite us to free
ourselves from their company, to part, as we are pushed by a kind
of "break with what diminishes Man".
When he was young Pierre Lamalattie went out for walks with his
grandmother. She was always filled with wonder for the shapes of
the plants or the grace of the foliages. To Lamalattie, a tree branch
remains the example of a perfect drawing which develops the same
pattern with infinite variations. The same could be said of many
natural components: rocks, clouds, trees, rivers, etc. Human productions
often appear disorderly, disparate, improbable… On the contrary,
the spectacle of nature very often combines amazing imagination
and deep unity - provided one knows how to look at it. It seems
as if kinds of algorithms are at work, unceasingly inventing variations
from a same theme. Actually, to Lamalattie nature is the absolute
reference as regards esthetics.
When things of nature are drawn, one is obliged to look at them
attentively; one is brought to understand their infinite complexity,
their richness of nuances. One closely perceives their relative
sizes and their number. There results a kind of giddiness from it.
How to draw a tree, of which one wants to represent every single
leaf? Each leaf however has its beauty, its colours, its position,
its orientation in space. It forms with all the others a world,
a galaxy! Depicting nature is for Pierre Lamalattie an invitation
to accede to the feeling of incommensurability.
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