“A monument of this city”: Mady de la Giraudière, or when the Ariège turned into a palette

Born in Toulouse on April 3. Therefore, 1922, Mady Couquet spent his childhood in Lavelanet, in the cradle of the family textile industry. For example, Very early attracted by the drawing. However, she discovered painting at five years by dressing the walls of her room of naive frescoes. Her father refuses that she joined the Fine Arts: self -taught. she paints “everyday poetry”, which she feels intimately, far from the academic canons.

In the 1950s, Anatole Jakovsky “The Pope of Naive” discovered her universe. “a monument this city”: mady Encouraged. she creates more than a hundred canvases in three years, including around forty exhibited in Paris (Galerie Urban, then Bénézit) in 1958. Success is there: Parisian salons, Nice or Vicq museums, then New York, Tokyo, Chicago … Mady quickly becomes “the paperwork of naive art”, a title which she claims with malice without denying her pictorial nuances.

A free artist, rooted in Ariège – "a monument this city": mady

But it is in Ariège that she finds her most true inspiration. In a 9 m² workshop. at the end of its garden in Lavelanet, Mady gets up each morning around 9:30 am to paint “as a boat captain”. She produces her colorful frescoes there factory. landscapes, biblical scenes which she defines as a living fairy tale, rich in detail, scents and light.

His attachment to the land of Olmes is palpable. She decorates the city: the church, the town hall, the covered market, the “a monument this city”: mady chapel … in 2012, becoming an officer of the arts and letters, she received the medal in Lavelanet. According to Marc Sanchez, mayor, she will remain “a monument in this city”.

Mady died at the age of 95 on February 24, 2018 in Lavelanet. Lavelanet cries a friend, a luminous ambassador: Ryton Cazenave evokes an artistic and friendly constant relationship. Today, his work, inseparable from its Ariège land, still radiates in this country which was its muse.