A beautiful interior, a window open on the sea. You are in front of a painting by Thierry de Gorostarzu. Have you seen the light? It is so bright that if you stay a moment in front of the canvas, you feel that it warms us.
Venice, Cap Ferret, the Amalfi Coast … Everywhere, the sea.
It is on a beach that the Basque painter began to paint, it is on the sand, facing the sea, that he placed his easel for the first time.
It was in front of the sea that he asked himself about the composition and the need to know where to look. It is there that he began to make his scales and his palette: “To rub herself to the difficulty, to plant and then to start again are part of the discovery of the painting. “Said Thierry de Gorostarzu modestly, who started late, only since 2003, in this artistic adventure.
Yet the vocation goes far. In childhood. “I must have been eight or nine years old. … I discovered painting and sculpture, through Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo without really knowing their life, let alone the period of the Renaissance. During a visit to the museum of the orangery where I accompanied my parents, I discovered the virtuosic touch of a Fragonnard, as well as the Watteau Gille who always sent me the image of the candid face to the world . I then had the intimate and unshakeable conviction that this was the only thing I could consider doing in this life. But this vocation is for a long time annoyed. It will first be necessary for Thierry de Gorostarzu to emancipate himself from an environment where one does not envisage being an artist, to dare to live his passion at last.
He is 37 years old when he sets foot in a painting studio and begins learning the living model. A few years later, he approached the oil painting. That’s it, it’s in its place. He will finally become what he thought he was since childhood, a painter. Very quickly his talent is recognized. A friend proposes to him to buy his first canvas, a boat stranded on the sand. ” I did not expect that. It was my first sale and I was quite unable to specify a price for him, so he was responsible for fixing it himself ”
2004 is the year of his first exhibition. At Saint-Lunaire in Brittany. Near the sea, which always accompanies it.
This does not prevent him from becoming a painter of armies. A way to stay true to his family origins that also inspired him.
“Another aspect that is very present in my painting is the theatrical dimension. Child and adolescent, I was very close to my uncle actor. Discovering theater at a very young age played an essential role in my life. The idea of theatrical illusion, the incarnation of a text, and finally a thousand things connected with the theater have structured and constructed my imagination. It is not surprising that when I discover Venice in 2015, with these sets and its colonnades, I find again the sensations experienced once behind the scenes. I see in them characters who emerge or leave the scene … The views on the sea, through the windows of the houses, when the gaze is lost on the horizon without any personage coming to disrupt the scene, bring me back to my contemplative childhood … The more I walk in painting, the more my soul turns back on my past.
The sensation of learning does not cease itself to evolve, through the crossing of bearings. The questioning is prolonged, reformulated, precise, briefly deepened. How can one search through his memory, grasp emotions, try to transcribe places and atmospheres on a canvas?
I continue to learn by looking at the elders but also my contemporaries. Christoff Debushere or Stéphane Ruais … Outstanding artists who gave me advice and encouragement. “Learning is Thierry de Gorostarzu’s master word. The painter is modest, moving, with brushes in his hand, his eyes open. Always ready to go to sea.”I am preparing an exhibition today for Beirut, a region of the world that I am about to discover, even if I intuitively feel I already know it. Beirut, I do not doubt, will only enrich and prolong my obsession to better understand the light … ”