a friendship without grand phrases
[ad_1]
“The Hand on the Heart”, by Yves Harté, Le Cherche Midi, “Les passe-murailles”, 156 p., €18.90, digital €14.
The devil is in the details. In the fall of 1996, The Knight’s hand on the chestthis portrait of a Spanish gentleman of the XVIe century painted by El Greco, is undergoing restoration. The result is spectacular, because the painting turns out to be surprisingly different. The black background from which the face stood out in a ghostly way has given way to a distant gray slightly tinged with pink which highlights the character’s clothing, his doublet hitherto engulfed in darkness. And, in the rediscovered contours, a curious asymmetry appears. The left shoulder is slumped, as if the arm was hanging inert. Hence this question: is it really the portrait of Juan de Silva, notary of the Kingdom of Spain? Or could it be that of his namesake cousin, crippled in a fight against the Moors and living a much more adventurous life?
A common passion for Spain
In The hand on the heart, Yves Harté leads the investigation. But his book goes beyond the scope of painting. This affair of identity forms the framework of another story which sneaks in and covers it, that of her friendship with Pierre Veilletet (1943-2013), about ten years his senior. A friendship without grand phrases or testimonials, a friendship “without obligation to say it”, made of emotions that come together, of understood silences, of simple harmony. They met in the late 1970s.
Veilletet was then a senior reporter, Prix Albert-Londres, responsible for writing Southwest Sunday. He accompanies his young colleague’s first steps in the profession and very quickly takes him on a series of trips to Spain, a country for which both have a passion. The first will take them, among other things, to the Prado, opposite El Greco’s canvas. How not to remember this particular moment? Veilletet saw in the gaze of the caballero a kind of mirror of the soul. When, shortly after his death, Yves Harté, during an exhibition in Toledo, finds himself again faced with the portrait, he associates it with the deceased to the point of thinking that they are strangely alike.
bittersweet melancholy
But it is between the two friends that we find many correspondences. After all, wasn’t Yves Harté also a great reporter, Albert-Londres Prize, and long-time editor-in-chief of South West ? But, rather than following in each other’s footsteps, it’s more about how to walk together. Harté writes in collusion. With that bittersweet melancholy which Pierre Veilletet often enveloped himself. A late writer, he had only decided to publish after his forties, and cast a modest and worried gaze on his work. “No one sees through their own tears”, he wrote. Much of it was collected in 2013 (Yes, I have known days of grace), at Arléa, of which he was one of the founders.
You have 13.85% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
[ad_2]
Source link
