A small, sloping street, a wall with its buttresses, an old lamppost, a flight of stairs, a block of buildings, Saint Peter's Church and its cemetery. These are representative elements of the Butte Montmartre brought together here in a very subjective collage. Roman Greco has deliberately built an imaginary whole made up of pieces of reality.
Although occupying only a quarter of the painted surface, the church and cemetery are the main subject. Out of their environment, we find them standing on an exaggeratedly raised promontory. They are highlighted, as if embedded, by two curved lines that contrast with the roofs and houses on the left. These are painted as an accumulation of multicolored and interwoven geometric figures. A lit lamppost and the dark blue of the sky suggest nightfall. However, the ocher, yellowish tones of the church and the cemetery illuminate the picture with an interior light, like a lighthouse dominating the landscape.
I went for a walk in the three paintings representing the Calvary Cemetery and the Church of Saint Pierre de Montmartre (No 69, 70 and 71). These are shaky, chaotic, mysterious, frightening grounds that I have stumbled upon more than once.
Roman Greco partially represents the visible world. We can easily identify the church, but only guess there is a cemetary in the foreground. But it is with an assumed subjectivity that he explores an interior world, hidden, linked to this place. A world of dissonance and heartbreak. The canvas is no longer a flat surface. He impulsively, furiously spreads a paste with exaggerated colors, creating thicknesses, reliefs, as if the painting were a terrain, a ground before being an picture. The result is a chaos caused by the destruction of forms and graphics, with juxtaposed, superimposed, and cracked spots as if thrown at random.
This generates so much ambiguity and instability that the configurations that can be detected there are only due to our imagination, to our fantasies,
to our own subjectivity. “Much more than the one who is inspired, the poet is the one who inspires” said Paul Eluard.
#6 - Le lapin à Gill - huile sur toile - 73x100 -1962
It is almost night on Montmartre, everything is still and silent. Le Lapin Agile (The Nimble Rabbit) seems drowsy, a pale glow does not soften the violence of the red façade, partly decrepit, very damaged. Spread with a palette knife, a coat of paint ranging from red to dirty brown re-creates the texture of the old wall; it reveals all the erosion and scars of time. The rest is a game of lights and shades, of shapes more or less defined in a chaos of thick coats of colours. The paint is scarcely spread on the canvas, often applied in small, squirmy and blended mounts. The trees for example come out almost as bas-reliefs. The gable on the left and the pavement are lit by the very last rays of a sun already set: “evening twilight” a fleeting moment rooted to the canvas… A door or a window left ajar lets out a white light and a few notes of blues, a concert is about to start, the Rabbit is calling us, let’s go for a stroll in Wonderland
Impulsive and often subjective graphics, imprecise or blurred outlines, surprising and deceptive perspectives, non-conforming colors, sometimes violent and which mix or overlap. Roman Greco takes us into a dreamlike world where urban landscapes, stones, walls, monuments become characters that come to life.
Thinking, the lamppost stands with folded arms. But why is the wall screaming?
Heroic, the old twisted building resists the weight of years and the light snow. It emanates a strange, almost unreal atmosphere of instability, under a sky often animated too.
Only the force of the colors stabilizes and immobilizes the scene, like a fleeting image remembering a dream.