Our neighborhood in Paris is thick with art galleries.  There must be close to one hundred within a twenty block radius of our apartment.  There used to be even more, but over the past several decades some of the smaller ones have been eased out by designer boutiques.   The Left Bank and particularly the Sixth Arrondissment has been the haunt of artists and writers since the nineteenth century.  A few blocks away one can see Delacroix’s magnificent paintings in the church of St. Sulpice, while a five minute walk in the opposite direction takes you to his studio near the Place Furstenbourg.  If you are a fan of Delacroix don’t be put off by the scaffoldings around the church.  They have been cleaning it for years; so long, in fact, the church could be renamed “Our Lady of the Perpetual Renovation.”  Or if your tastes in art run more to the modern, Picasso’s studio is a stone’s throw away near the Seine.  But as I can afford neither a Delacroix nor a Picasso, I spend my time in the galleries looking at everything from eighteenth century etchings to contemporary art.  While I mainly window shop, the wonderful French translation of which is “leche vitrine,” literally to “lick the windows,” occasionally I see something I adore and I take the plunge. In this regard, two years ago I discovered a little gallery called Galerie du Fleuve, appropriately named as it sits at 6 rue de Seine next to the river.  The owner Roy Sfeir and his charming wife Claudia, represent a contemporary artist by the name of Francois Bard whose large oil canvases are breathtaking in their intensity, in fact are pure theater in the best sense of the term; and yet considering that his paintings are found in private collections across Europe and in the United States, the prices that he commands are very reasonable.

If I had to think of one word to describe Bard’s paintings it would be “edgy.”  There is a dark, urban quality to his paintings that evokes both a sense of danger and of the loneliness, and alienation of modern, urban life.  He achieves this not only though the darkness of coloration and much of his subject matter, but also by the isolation, even abstraction of his subjects.  Bard, not only favors the close-up, he often paints fragments: a man’s head, a woman’s legs, a man’s feet, a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. His subjects are invariably shown waiting, alone, but waiting for what or whom?  Some of his best known paintings are of people with their dogs.  Curiously, the perspective is from the vantage point of another dog and Bard’s dogs are always alert, on edge.  You can tell they have seen or heard something that their owners haven’t noticed yet.  There is a freshness to these paintings that is particularly impressive, because paintings of dogs are so often sentimentalised and clichéd.

In the last few years Bard has begun painting landscapes.  His treatment of them is similar to that of the human body.  He focuses upon fragments in the foreground that recede into a distance that is often a mere slash of color.  These paintings have an abstract quality that is remarkable.  All of his paintings combine a technical virtuosity with a dark and yet stunningly beautiful vision of modern life.

 L’hommes aux Gants 2007  (63×51 in) 1 (private collection Paris)  p. 83

Pensees Nocturnes  2004   (48×40 in)  (private collection Miami)

Sans Titre  2004  (59×59 in)   (private collection London)

Sans Titre  2007  (63×51 in)  p. 131

L’Or des Ombres  2005  (48x 40in)

L’Oeil Bleu   2004  (77x 59in)  (private collection London) p. 52

Birkenstock Rouges 2007 (77x 59in)   (private collection New York)

Apres le Depart  2007  (59x 63 in)    p. 100

For more information on Bard’s painting contact Roy Sfeir (who speaks English) at

Galerie du  Fleuve

6 rue du Fleuve, 75006 Paris

Tel 01 43 26 08 96

www.galerie-du-fleuve.com

A couple of years ago my parents decided that they wanted to spend part of the year living closer to me and my young family.  They loved the small community feel of Key Biscayne where we live, but thought that many houses were out of scale on the small lots.  On the other hand, while they found the fifties developer’s houses, amusing,  having actually grown up in the fifties and sixties they didn’t see them as retro and ironic so much as a remembrance of what the cheap, post war housing looked like when they were children.  In light of this, they decided to renovate a fifties bungalow beyond recognition. 

 And so, they bought the cheapest, and arguably ugliest “teardown” on Key Biscayne.  

The current owner, whose tastes ran to the functional, disliked trees. In fact, vegetation in general, unless it was useful.  And so the only two trees that he tolerated on the property were a couple of sickly orange in the front that produced the occasional mouthful of juice.  He proudly told my parents that he cut down every tree in the back when he put in the pool, as they dropped leaves in the water!  His approach to the inside of his house was equally functional.  The walls in the living room, kitchen, dining room and office were panelled in what looked like plywood, but which he announced was cedar panelling.  He laughed that he kept the house dark so the dirt wouldn’t show. All of this is a real estate agent’s nightmare, but my parents saw it as a blank slatet.

In addition to designing furniture, I am a design consultant, so my parents quite naturally turned to me to help them transform the place.  They gave me four guidelines: that the design be modernist inside and out, that it be light, that it be built around their art collection, and that it not cost a fortune.  We doubled the size of the kitchen and added a second guest bathroom by extending out on either side of the entrance.  Then to achieve symmetry and hide the sloped bungalow roof we connected these additions with a beam and pillars.  By these simple and inexpensive measures the existing house literally disappeared!

We removed the dying orange trees and the semicircular driveway and planted a stand of palms.  Rather than grass we opted for pea gravel framed at the boundary of the property by a ficus hedge.  While the hedge is small at present, in a couple of years it will be trimmed to eight feet tall to create a private, room-like feel to the front garden that mirrors the spaces of the porticoed entrance and the interior public rooms.  Once the hedge reaches full height, the front will become a sculpture garden of the sort that one finds in the south of France.  In the back, we removed the grass, extended the terrace and planted the narrow borders with ficus and mature palms.  The nasty, sloping 1960s addition was raised and a canopied outside dining area was added to achieve symmetry at the back of the house.

Internally, the renovations were relatively superficial and yet transformative.  The principal expense was to replace all the windows and doors with seven foot high sliding glass doors at the front and back. This simple measure not only flooded a dark house with light, but provided a clear view from the front garden through to the back.  Beyond that, symmetry was achieved internally by opening up the rooms and separating them with a series of beams and pillars that mirrored the structure of the façade.  All the walls are white as is the floor, with color provided by the art, books and a mix of antique and modern furniture. 

The result is that for under $250,000 something hideous was transformed into something quite beautiful.