The journalist and writer delivers a sensitive evocation of his friend Pierre VEILLETET, also journalist and writer, died in 2013.
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The devil is hidden in the details. In the fall of 1996, the knight in hand on the chest , this portrait of a Spanish gentleman from the 16th century century painted by Greco, enters restoration. The result is spectacular because the painting is surprisingly different. The black background from which the face was detached in a ghostly way has given way to a distant gray slightly tinged with pink which highlights the habit of the character, his doublet hitherto swallowed up in the dark. And, in the contours found, a curious asymmetry appears. The left shoulder is sagged, as if the arm hung inert. Hence this question: is it indeed the portrait of Juan de Silva, notary of the Kingdom of Spain? Or would it not be that of his cousin namesake, crippled in a fight against the Moors and with a very adventurous life?
a common passion for Spain
In hand on the heart, Yves Harté is investigating. But his book overflows the framework of painting. This identity affair makes the web of another story that sneaks there and covers it, that of his friendship with Pierre watch (1943-2013), of a ten years his elder. A friendship without great sentences or testimonies, a friendship “without obligation to say it”, made of emotions that meet, including silences, simple harmony. They met in the late 1970s.
Watch out is then a great reporter, Albert-London Prize, editorial manager of Sud-Ouest on Sunday. He accompanied the first steps of his young colleague in the profession and very quickly embarked on a series of trips to Spain, a country for which both have a passion. The first will lead them, among others, to Prado, facing the Greek canvas. How not to remember this particular moment? Survivaltet saw in the eyes 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 in front of the portrait, he associates him with the disappeared to the point of thinking that stretching, they are alike.
Solder-douce melancholy
But it is between the two friends that there are many correspondence. After all, was Yves Harté also been a big reporter, Albert-London Prix, and long editor-in-chief in South West? But, rather than walking in the footsteps of the other, it is more of the way of walking together that it is. Harté written in connivance. With this bitter-douce melancholy which was often wrapped up by watch. Late writer, he had only decided to publish his quarantine, and posed a modest and worried look at his work. “No one sees through his own tears,” he wrote. A large part was gathered in 2013 (yes, I knew days of grace), at Arléa, of which he was one of the founders.
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