The biggest concentrations of artists’ studios are up in the north of Paris, around Montmartre and Belleville, and there are also open days in the south, in the 14th arrondissement. You can consult listings on the internet at www.parisgratuit.com/ateliers.html, but unless you’re looking for a specific artist, the best thing often is to go to the hub of the neighbourhood and follow your nose, or rather your ears—Parisian artists rarely seem to create without musical accompaniment, preferably either old French chansons, Bob Marley or bleeping techno.
Open the porte
The steeply rising rue de Belleville has long been a neat little Chinatown, with end-to-end restaurants, but the streets immediately to the east and north have suffered from the kind of urban regeneration that involved demolishing old buildings and then saying, ‘Hmm, what shall we do now?’ In most cases, the answer was, ‘Stick up a cheap, ugly apartment building that will start to crumble in ten years.’ Elsewhere, it was more a case of, ‘Let’s brick it up and leave it to decay, and then maybe someone will give us a grant to build a cheap, ugly …’ etc.
The destruction was caused by a city plan at the end of the 1980s to turn the area into a zone d’aménagement concerté, literally a concentrated redevelopment zone, but after several years of demolition, the plan was shelved, leaving the area scarred but at least half intact.
More recently, many empty buildings have been squatted by artists, and lots of the old shops have also been taken over by créateurs of various kinds—jewellers, clothes designers, lampshade makers and the like. The artiness has even spread to some of the surviving traditional shops—a plumber’s showroom and a grocer’s both have façades that have been decorated by graffiti artists, with the consent of the owners, that is.
The rue Dénoyez, in which half the buildings are bricked up, is now a permanent outdoor gallery, with whole façades painted over. On the open day I attended, there was a large painting of a rhinoceros being pleasured by a gorilla and a crocodile, while itself doing erotic (but very painful-looking) things to a monkey with its horn. Its title was Belleville Zoophilie, or Belleville Bestiality, not something that most of us would want to commission for our living rooms, but very Parisian—there aren’t many cities where such public displays of animal amour would be tolerated, even in the zoos.
It was also a reminder that, these days, many of Paris’s most creative young artists work in a comic-book style. The French love bandes dessinées, or BD, and the cultural establishment is even beginning to acknowledge this form of art, so that the launch of a big French BD gets as much—and as respectful—media coverage as a new Monet exhibition.
Next to the rhino-led orgy, a young man was up a ladder, daubing blue paint over the walls and windows of a low-rise building. I watched as he made long, swooping strokes with his roller on a stick, and slowly a blue elephant came into soft focus, apparently charging at the owner of the café next door, who was watching anxiously, as though worried that the animals might stampede across his windows.
Wandering further along the street, I visited a ceramic artist called Guy Honore. Using an apartment-block motif, he had made sculptures of dream-like cities, one of which was painted white and lime green, and had large leaves overrunning the urban scene, like the ideal French nouvelle ville. And for art lovers with no space on their mantelpiece for a ceramic new town, he had used the same motif on a cute cubic teapot.
A few doors down was a kind of Parisian Andy Warhol who had taken the photos-to-paintings theme and given it a French twist, creating Pop Art portraits of the poet Arthur Rimbaud and singers Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens. Not exactly an original style, but Rimbaud’s photo definitely deserves to be as iconic as anything that Warhol adapted.
Next I ventured into a dark studio hung with lengths of coloured fabric, some of them spliced down the middle with a splash of metal. The artist was sitting in a chair staring at me as I gazed around, and replied to my greeting with a questioning ‘Bonjour?’ Then I realized why she looked confused—it was a haberdasher’s shop, and the metal-spliced pieces of material were zips. I apologized and left, though if I’d been a conceptual artist, I’d have bought the whole place, haberdasher and all, and sold it to the Musée d’Art Moderne as an installation symbolizing the way the modern French cultural establishment is zipped shut to truly iconoclastic ideas (except my own, of course).
Heading up the rue Ramponeau, I came to the demolition site that is La Forge. This is a group of studios in a former key factory that used to be hidden behind a large apartment block. The main building has been replaced by a large gap in the street line that is one day destined to be filled with social housing.
On the wall of the building next door, the artists who now occupy La Forge have created a six-storey-high mural, a scene of urban degeneration, with blood, skulls, decapitation and what looked like a massive pair of hairy human legs using the apocalyptic landscape as a footstool. There was also a gorilla head and yet another mention of Belleville Zoo, so I asked the first artist I could find why this was. A reference to the urban jungle, no doubt? No, the painter told me, it is a homage to the song ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ by Ol’ Dirty Bastard. I looked this up on Google and found that it’s a cute little ditty in which the rapper boasts that he has never been ‘tooken out’ by a ‘nigga who couldn’t figure how to pull a f*ckin gun trigga’. Not an influence that one might expect in the city of Monet,
