"When sincerity of desire does not exist anymore, the haughty "anything goes" sets a fashion, and sad avant-garde terrorism comes to an end into reverse conformism where Beauty is a fault. "In a time of Imposture", said Bernanos, "the scandal is in Truth". In our suicidal Modernity, that is where scandal exists in Géneau's paintings. Géneau has the audicity of sincerity, the originality of simplicity, the courage of aesthetic pleasure, the strength in color subtility. He does not dismiss reality in the name of ideas as in abstract painting ; he does not aim at a more real than real in a phantasmic hyperreality ; he does not attempt to deceive the eye like the famous Zeuxis. He knows that beauty as well as poetry are neither in things nor outside things, but in our glance, this instantaneous moment of eternity. In front of his works, I feel like doing a pastiche of Didereot in his Chardin's eulogy at the time of the 1765 exhibition : "You are coming just in time, Géneau, to recreate our eyes". This artist knows how to draw the eternal from the transitory, the sublime from the ordinary, the precious from the perishable. He has been able to pull painting beyond itself from within itself. Of course, everything here must pass by the eyes, but it is from the sight that synesthesic correspondence dear to Beaudelaire is born. On his canvasses, "there are fragances like children's flesh, soft like oboes, green like prairies". This floral and crystalline compositions that sometimes cultivate the unusual for the pleasure of the gesture have the balance and the subtle evanescence of classical music where notes are rumpled in a rustling of archives. << Return There is an April modesty in that summer efflorescence, a taste of the immaculate in his conceptions. His bouquets with a feminine curve stretch themselves in lewd ingenuousness above their vases like freshly wet nymphs coming out of ambiguousness. A mysterious finger seems to retain their ingenuous petals which take the place of a caress from Eros. The glance appears to be moved by this virginity which offers itself in hazy indecency. A gesture too many and his sweet Eurydices would vanish forever in the morning mist into which the outline is already drowing. A diaphanous veil blurs the aridity of things and beings that are outlined without violence in a strange luminous purity. A silky sensuality filters in this way from the imperceptible in a pale Apocalyptic freshness. Nothing is more mysterious than what one does not see in that which one is looking at ; nothing invites more desire and pleasure than what is missing in that which, yet, is offering itself. "The Beautiful", said Valéry, "is the representation of that wich cannot be defined in things" ; however, it is this Irreducible that his brush makes erotic. Géneau excels in transparency. He places objects in that uncertain fringe, that precarious "intermediarity" where the eyes sees the invisible. In that pictorial diaphany, Beauty is not forced ; it settles and rests, vanishes as if it were doing so from a monstrance. It is as if Chardin was getting married to Watteau, as if the Epiphany of the matter was arising from an imaginary shroud. Jean-Pierre CHOPIN.