Last week I was in Paris. I entered into a major art gallery. Bright, large, located in a beautiful part of the city. The young woman who welcomed me was eating a sandwich and he hastens to hide it behind a stack of catalogs that were on his desk.

I tell her that I just want to take a look. She smiles and makes a gesture with her hand, inviting me to feel free. She doesn’t go back to her sandwich, but stays a few steps behind me, then she sees that I stop in front of a large white canvas, on which there is a point drawn with the pencil. I’m looking at the huge white space on which the small point seems lost and so alone. And I think of the girl’s sandwich and I feel sorry to have interrupted her snack.

But she thinks that I like the painting and approaches. She explains that it’s called « Thought of artist” speaks for half an hour about the mottos of the soul of the artist who drew that point. His turbulent past, his travels, the drugs, the suicide attempt, the outburst in the art. Art … My thoughts rear, I imagine that artist (“artist”?) In an attic of Montparnasse, drunk, a summer morning, like this. He wakes up and looks at a fly strolling on the white canvas. He follows her with his eyes and then she flies away. He stares corrugated to the  indelible mark she left on the white canvas. He approaches, he looks. He finds beautiful that small ejection and decides to leave the canvas as it is. “Thought of artist” …

Her voice wakes me from my ruminations: “It costs only 18,000 Euros.”