art-squeeze

around the side wall of an impeccably polished gallery showcasing soft-edgy and hip-weary contemporary chinese art is the most ferociously raw and haphazardly "collaborative" piece of exterior ooze...
the peeling paint, the almost unassuming tags, the anthropomorphic turd[??], the abstract black and white patches, the grit and the grime - all contribute to a visual palette exuding out of some primeval need to squeeze the ink out of pens, the paint out of brushes, the spray out of cans and make a mark, a gesture, a movement, to inform this bleary-eyed jaded crowded wilderness that is paris contemporary primitive...

[Rue du Poitou]

brain-freeze

an arresting image in the window of Atelier KAO on rue Commines made me stop in my tracks and study this enormously detailed brain-like painting made from "l'encre dropée sur la toile"...
the organic conglomeration of such a densely writhing and squiggly mass hijacked my eyes into its mesmerizing visual labyrinth, and as I captured it in my camera, the image fused with my own congested greyish matter in a frozen web of inky darkness...

rejointoiement

from messy working garage to pristine art factory, this slimmed down solo citroen by Gabriel Orozco, our part-time neighbour in Paris, has pride of place on an upper level of the Centre Pompidou...
in the end is it just a lovely old french car cut in half and re-served as a clever sculptural counterpoint to over-slick showrooms of over-sleek new models promising yet more roomy joy-rides...
[or looking backwards in my rétroviseur, I may be slightly regretful for the missing middle...]

rejuvenation

she seems so vulnerable and violated - her belly exposed, her mouth opened in a silent cry, her eyes blinded, and thin wires like delicate veins pulled out through various orifices...
I am seldom witness to the mechanics of rejuvenation surgery of older models, and the inner workings of a traditional messy garage with its scattering of strangely shaped tools and instruments and bottles of toxic ooze...
all in the service of beautifying and reinvigorating a once sweet young thing that refuses to stay off the streets...

bleu180

this is an intriguing number on a cobalt blue back door...
not indicating an address, nor a company's name...
a measurement, perhaps?...180 cm high?
a directional key?...180 meters up? 180 steps down...to hell??
180 degrees upside down???
I am still puzzled...
[actually I do know it is advising that the door is 1.8 meters high, but for those who do not calculate in metric, it is an odd number to contemplate...]

[located somewhere south of the Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière and west of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France F.M. in an area where contemporary galleries once had high hopes of thriving...]

red 13

trapped behind 2 bars and glass, I thought a superhero had been captured and incarcerated under this most unpopular of numbers...
upon closer study, he appears to be a proud gladiator or centurion confined in a niche once reserved for a more sanctified figure, [although he does hold a cross to his chest and what seems to be a large black bird lies at his feet!], but now he stands guard within a blood-red wall on a street where nothing much happens...

[anybody knows whom he might represent?]

[13, rue Charles V]

archi-totemic

the "gangplank" balconies jutting out precariously from the upper floors caught my eye as I biked along the other side of the Bassin de la Villette - enough to make me stop to take a picture - and I immediately wanted to go up there and experience the vertigo of being out on those bold protrusions...
the angled verticals of this structure as defined as well by the different colour applications [white and graphite grey on this façade, burnished red on the other side] provide a dynamic visual interest that attempts to reflect the Suprematist ideals of Malevich by which the architectural design's sculptural arrangements must express effecting aesthetic and emotional values...
in other words, height and bulk can be made to look appealing - and even playful to live in...just don't play crazy pirates way up there!

[known as "Totem" and "Tower of Flandres", this building was designed by Pascal Chombart de Lauwe and Jean Lamude of TECTONE in 1996,
27-29, avenue de Flandre et 6, rue du Maroc (19th)]

face-off

on the side wall of a non-descript apartment building friendly faces of various hues and ages loom over me... they may be residents of the neighbourhood, they may be well-known personages [I think I recognize a couple - Piaf? Chevalier?]...
they animate the bland architecture and they make one lift one's gaze from street level to make eye contact with their stacked and larger than life visages...

[portrait mural by Claude Cussinet and Andre Pistun on Rue de Belleville]

rest in pieces

I walk through the small busy marché outside the cemetery walls and enter the floating stillness within a garden of perpetual rest...

alone in the bright light of day I am unafraid to approach the neglected tombs of forgotten souls - one now marked by only a broken crucifix and a few fallen twigs - a perfectly untouched nature morte that bespeaks the poetics of death more eloquently than the most ornamented graves...

[Cimetière de Belleville, a small cemetery with one prominent "resident" whom I googled - Léon GAUMONT (1864-1946), an inventor, engineer, industrialist and a pioneer of the motion picture industry]