Here is the thing nobody tells you about doing galleries in a strange city. You get up early because you are excited, you walk half an hour with a full bag, and you arrive at a beautiful door with the lights off and a sign that says half past twelve.
Twenty to ten. Rue de Charonne. The graphic art gallery I had come for takes up four floors and two hundred square metres of contemporary drawing, and it does not open until the middle of the day. My own fault. I had the address, I did not have the hours.
So I stood in the street with the whole morning in front of me, and the street started handing things over.
A little girl in a flag dress, pasted low on the render, standing with her back to the whole street and her nose almost against the plaster. She is not looking at you and she is not looking at Paris. She is in the corner.
And look at the wall she is on. Four or five layers of render coming off in continents, a grey tide line halfway up, islands of old paint. I spent longer on the wall than on the paste-up, which probably tells you something about me. In ink that surface is all dry brush and broken edge… you could not draw it neatly if you tried.
Another window, another closed gallery. Inside, a figure built out of rusted checker plate and painted offcuts, with a head made of cut metal clouds. One tiny eye. Whoever welded that had the confidence to leave the rust exactly where it landed, and I stood there working out how you get that many textures into one silhouette without it turning to mud.
Then this, which made me laugh out loud in an empty street. A skinny building with a flag in every window. Sweden, Germany, the States, South Africa, Brazil, Switzerland, Argentina, France, Portugal, two more up in the roof. No Australia. Eleven windows of the world and not one of us.
Last one before I gave up and went down to Bastille. An aubergine door, two brass knobs worn gold in the middle, whitewash flaking off red brick all around it. The kind of purple you only get away with on a door.
The market was on the list for today. What I actually have to show for that leg is two video clips shot at Bastille, and I have now watched them both. One is zero seconds long. The other is one second of my thumb. A whole career in animation and I still cannot press record properly.
Up the hill next. There is a square up there where the painters work, and I want to see how they do it.
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.
