Germaine Pratsevall (born in 1935) is a rare artist and a woman who remembers and stays true to her friends in art. When the Musée Réattu organised her first institutional exhibition in 1985, the artist donated a large scale painting that was characteristic of her work.
So it seemed almost natural when, in 2016, she chose to donate a further 350 paintings, produced between 1979 et 2004, along with 134 engravings. This donation was made possible by the inventory work led by Dominique Mazel, the former curator of the Méjanes Library in Aix-en-Provence.
Germaine Pratsevall is a painter of colour and, above all, light. Her unique creative material is rag paper, which she pricks with a needle, allowing air and space to penetrate. She then soaks the sheet in a paint-filled container, in a gesture reminiscent of an engraver (her initial training) as he immerses the plaque in the acid bath. This primary gesture is essential as the colour is not applied to the paper, it penetrates it. A phrase by Yves Klein springs to mind: “colour inhabits space.”
After allowing the paper to dry, she works on it with a paintbrush, often going back to it several times. She is an exceptionally exacting artist, just as she was as a teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Aix-en-Provence from 1962 to 1996. This exigence, revolving around a creation that goes beyond showing, is inevitably governed by the requirements of works which, in her ideal “ should be suspended outside like the leaves of trees.”
It was with some reservations that she agreed to the demands of an exhibition, after being won over by a series of encounters with the likes of Michel Monory (1984 Galerie Athanor, Marseille), Michèle Moutashar (1986 Musée Réattu, Arles) and author Michel Butor (Institut Français, UK, Galerie Matisse, London).
Germaine Pratsevall’s work should be approached as a whole; as she herself says,“I’ve only ever made one painting”. However, for the artist, it is the works which have the last word: “you want to see them all together, but it’s impossible, they take revenge.”
