strange occurence

 "Il faut systématiquement explorer le hasard"

… a french saying that is difficult to translate, to the extent that "hasard" is neither chance, nor hazard of course, nor luck, just a happenstance dictated by forces we cannot grasp. I do believe it is a dimension every artist deals with. It has a lot to do with tuning in with what you intuit more than with what you can rationalize.

Myself, I was quite destabilized when, two month after painting an "Urban Disaster" in lower Manhattan, 911 happened. And it's just one example of such occurrences.

 Here is another one. In the early seventies, I met John Baldessari in New York at the Sonabend gallery; he was a pioneer of conceptual art, I had just turned away from the "avant-garde" to dive into the world of figural painting. Our paths could not have been more diverging. Two months ago, I painted a still life of a big apple.

I like subjects that have a certain symbolic weight. And then, the other day, as I was reading the november issue of Art Review (London) I fell upon a full page advertisement for John Baldessari featuring a big apple. Not just any apple, one that was obviously a close cousin of the one I painted. What struck me is how two radically diverging paths could cross each other in such a way. See for yourself!