Galerie Paul Prouté

1984 marked a period of artistic renewal in Gérard Garouste’s work; he turned away from still lifes and genre scenes and began a genuine dialogue with literary texts. In addition to the Bible, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Rabelais’s Gargantua, and Goethe’s Faust, the literary work that would continue to fuel the artist’s imagination from 1985 onward was Dante’s Divine Comedy, as translated by Jacqueline Risset—and more specifically, the cantos of Hell and Purgatory.

The fantastical journey of the poet and his guide—Canto XIII of which is illustrated here—allows the artist to develop a highly personal, dreamlike atmosphere through engravings, paintings, and drawings. These works are often executed in India ink and annotated in mirror image using the same medium. Here, one can read the first seven tercets of Canto XIII of The Divine Comedy.