You walk along the rue de Rivoli, which is all phone shops and tourists and buses, and then there is a building with a giant painted face hanging off the first floor balcony and flowers the size of cars bolted to the front of it.
Giant hibiscus, three ladybirds, a beetle, a pair of blue feet dangling off the ironwork, and a flat blue face two storeys up with a red mouth. On a Haussmann facade. In the first arrondissement. Somebody in the city planning office had to sign off on that and I would love to have watched the meeting.
The story is better than the front. On the first of November 1999, three artists opened up a doorway that had been cemented shut. The building had sat empty for about fifteen years, owned by a bank and then the state, in the middle of one of the most expensive streets in Europe. They moved in, other artists came, and they ran it as a squat called Chez Robert, free electrons.
Then the clever part. A man running for mayor came through, loved it, and promised that if he won he would make it legal. He won. The city bought the building in 2006, spent three years fixing it, and reopened it in 2009 with thirty studios in it. Six days a week, one in the afternoon until eight, walk in off the street, no ticket.
An occupied building became public property and stayed in artists’ hands. I climbed the stairs feeling quite emotional about it, which is not a normal reaction to a stairwell.
First room and I nearly walked into a giant book. Printed pages sewn together, propped open on a stand, faces drawn over the type. Behind it a sheet of hessian pegged up like washing with a whole crowd on it, all eyes, all mouths, done in a single unbroken line each.
That is the thing I keep meeting in Europe. Nobody here seems to think drawing needs a nice surface. Sacking, newsprint, a door, a wall. The line does not care.
Upstairs, a printmaker. Dark tonal plates, mounted and laid out on the bed of the press, tissue folded over the top ones. All of them black and grey and smoke, no line at all, just weather. Beside them a scrap of yellow paper: do not touch please, and again in French underneath, which I thought was very generous.
I stood there a long time with my hands behind my back like a child at a museum.
And then the room that undid me, so I filmed it instead of trying to describe it. White walls, concrete floor with forty years of paint trodden into it, and drawings the size of doors leaning everywhere. Graphite. Zebras coming out of a cloud of it. Water. A figure lying down inside a thicket of pencil marks so dense it turns silver.
Every one of those is thousands of strokes and hours of somebody’s arm, and they are propped against a wall in a building that was broken into.
Two floors up, the exact opposite. Hairdryers hanging on their own cords with sculpted mouths in them, full sets of teeth, one with a sausage for a tongue. A table of painted bread and bananas. A figure in thick black ink straight onto the wall behind, all hair and no face.
The whole building works like that. Sombre room, silly room, sombre room, and nobody has made them agree with each other.
Same room, on its own plinth, correctly lit: a ham and pickle baguette. Modelled, painted, absolutely convincing, and treated with more respect than most of my drawings get.
Out of there and back into the day job. I went to the third and sat with a gallery’s price list, the real one, sizes and materials and numbers in a column. I am not publishing somebody else’s pricing. I will only say that the numbers next to the charcoal and pastel work were higher than I expected, and that they are set by people who do not apologise for them.
Last stop near République, a door standing open, brass plate, white room, and something bright and beaded sitting on the boards inside. 193 Gallery, started in 2018, and their whole line is work from the Global South, the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia. Not the usual list.
The lesson of today is one sentence long. The building they had to break into is free and full, and every door I photographed today was open.
Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.
A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.
For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.
