Today was a looking-through-glass day. Gallery windows, museum glass, shop glass. By four o’clock I had spent more time with my nose near a pane than a window cleaner.
First one, a little gallery in the streets near the Palais Royal. A bronze figure, a painting like a tree of life in lolly colours, and a Paris street scene signed Vulcain leaning at the front. I photographed it through the glass, so you also get the buildings behind me for free. I have decided to call that a collaboration.
Then the Drawing Lab on rue de Richelieu, a free drawing space under a hotel, currently showing their Drawing Factory artists. The one that stopped me was Dana Cojbuc, a Romanian artist who has been in France about fifteen years. She takes a black and white photograph of clouds and then keeps going in charcoal and dry pastel, so a dark mountain grows up out of the print. The label calls it tirage pigmentaire et dessin au fusain. I call it refusing to accept the photo is finished, and I am completely on her side.
Late afternoon I found the Village Saint Honoré, one of those stone passages you would walk straight past, except this one has a giant pink KAWS companion standing outside a gallery like a bouncer who has given up. There is even a tiny tile mosaic invader hiding low on the wall. Old stone, gas lamp, enormous pink toy. Nobody blinked but me.
The gallery is Galerie Montorgueil and inside it is floor to ceiling collectables. Companions in every colour, a Big Bird, pixel mosaics of every video game character I grew up with, a Catwoman on a give way sign. It is pop art as a lolly shop and I mean that kindly. After a morning of charcoal mountains it was like being handed a bag of sherbet.
Feet are done. Tomorrow the Marais, and a man who wrote the novels and still found time to out-draw most of us.
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.
