Similar to the “Vanities” of the great Flemish Masters where, beside profane splendours, brocades, silks and jewels, a skull or a funeral charade always appeared, Peyrolle’s paintings move away irremediably as we believe that we are deciphering them. The pleasure that they offer us is constantly thwarted by the presence of death in filigree. In this sense, this meticulous figuration which is Pierre Peyrolle’s trademark is much more “abstract” than painting of the same name, much more “conceptual” than the empty art of the Masters of the “Nothing”.

However, Pierre Peyrolle knows well that he will not resuscitate “Great Painting”. His extreme virtuosity, his artistic precision, his eagerness, his perseverance in creating a clinical representation of our civilization, will not return life to Art. It thus remains for Peyrolle to raise in the distance a haughty and inaccessible mausoleum akin to the “lsland of the Dead” of Arnold Böcklin. Pierre Peyrolle has already painted three gigantic pictorial comments on the ”Island”.

These signals that he sends us from a sinking wreck, Pierre Peyrolle hardly counts that we will perceive them, us, his contemporaries. The museum curators, the art critics, even the collectors find cumbersome this painting of history, or rather this painting of the end of history.

Peyrolle’s precision, his coherence, his laconism, contrast too much with what hangs in galleries today: the blur, the chatter, the undecided. So, Pierre Peyrolle continues to paint as one commits suicide; or rather as one sacrifices oneself, to raise above the flood of mediocrity an awaiting pedestal.