Végas del condado (Paysage espagnol), (Série "Grands paysages")

Paul Rebeyrolle's “Paysage” series, created in 1977, reflects his passion for nature, like that of Gustave Courbet, an artist he admired above all others. He said of his landscapes: “I want the viewer to have the feeling of being inside them, to have, as I did, the powerful emotion of rock, flowing water, moss, thorns, etc. I want the person looking at my landscape to say to himself: I am in it, I am with the painter, I am participating.”

His powerful and generous matterist work, especially this painting Végas del condado [Spanish Landscape], is a call to freedom, a manifesto of revolt against injustice, oppression, and human alienation, but also an ode to the beauty of an indomitable nature that is also completely free.

According to him, painting, which is always situated between the sumptuous and the tragic, has a vocation to alert: “There must be a joy in painting. One cannot speak about serious things with a downcast tone. The world is made in such a fashion that the most tragic things must, once painted, create the most beautiful terrors.”

François Pinault was made aware of the importance of Paul Rebeyrolle by his friend Pierre Daix, and he soon became one of the artist's leading collectors, acquiring his first work in 1988. Between then and 2003, the date of his most recent acquisition, fourteen works entered the Pinault Collection, including the masterly Végas del condado [Spanish Landscape] from 1978.