The Squat is a five-story walk-up with a worn marble staircase running up its center. I was looking for ghosts, too, and I would swear I could hear whispers of the bygone as I went up and down it, circling and side slanting as I went up, and as the ancients had done, sloughing off more marble with each step on the way down. I get that way in urban places with a lot of history, and of course in Paris I developed a pretty bad case of it, ah Paris. Indeed, on the walls everywhere in the common spaces of the Squat including in the stairwell, there were items and images, works of art, and minutia of every sort and of unknown provenance that I assume were the bequeathed collected leavings of artists alive and long dead who inhabited the place over decades. Running parallel to and about a block off from the Seine, the boulevard Rivoli is a one-way street heading in the direction of the Place de la Concorde. One of the most exclusive thoroughfares in Paris, in one direction down Rivoli is the Hotel D’Ville (the Parisian city hall), and the backside of the Louvre as well. In the other direction sits the Pompidou Center, and the ultra chic yet venerable section of town called the Beau Bourg, which to the ears of some Americans sounds something like Bobo when the French say it.
Swiss Morrocain was born David Hardy in southwestern Germany to parents of, you guessed it, Swiss and Moroccan descent. If ever there were someone of whom it could be said he had (re)invented himself, it would be Swiss. Although very much the citizen of the larger Europe, it seemed to this viewer that he is truly what he has presented himself to be, a Parisian artist extraordinaire, a stylist of l’boheme, maybe a hedonist, and I suspect, a raconteur.
Swiss holds forth and works in a set of rooms in the Squat that might have been the drawing room and back servant’s pathways on a floor of a building that once housed the private quarters of bankers and barristers and their wives and their bourgeois broods. Swiss’s studio shows the ways of an inveterate collector in which almost anything of interest to the creative mind has been piled high. The studio comes off much like a Parisian Miss Havesham’s place, filled with things from all parts of Paris and all quarters of the globe and from all ages and times, arrived to inhabit and, one would think, to stay put in the space, perhaps already loaded with the dust of centuries. Unlike Miss Havesham’s static rooms however, Swiss’ have a sort of dynamism. For his art-making purposes he picks and chooses from this pile as if from the cat’s deep delved bag.
They say that the studios of the Laundry Boat, the Bateau Lavoire, were like this over the decades of the last of the nineteenth and into the first years of the twentieth century—an eternally dusty paint-peeled old bin of a place. It was a working studio nonetheless and so is the Squat. Across the river is the art quarter called St. Germaine—one of the oldest and most idyllic neighborhoods of Paris renowned for its old school, bookish galleries.
Also on that side of the river resides the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts, and tucked in just there is a wonderfully quaint but well stocked arts supply store looking for all like an old-time apothecary with wood-lined cupboards with glass-windowed doors and large presentation drawers. The proprietor is an affable man who puts the lie to the notion that the French dislike Americans. I found everywhere in Paris that my courtesy invoked just that back to me in every respect and in every situation in which I found myself.
Swiss Morrocain is in Paris to work and participate in the life of bohemia that still washes through the Parisian substrate. Nearly anything short of murder goes in the city of lights and probably some of that too in its far darkest corners. He is a painter who has some street chops in the city. He is known for his loose and supple painting style in which with a wristy turn and a flick of a long-tailed brush he can conjure up and materialize nearly anything on earth and a great deal that is not of this world at all. Swiss is also Calder-esque in that he has a penchant for making sure that everyone who visits the studio leaves with something. Like many Parisian artists, he multi-tasks, working also as a designer of clothing and hats and sometimes as a designer of patterns for printing on fabric. But it is also as a teacher (degreed in southern Germany) and as a mentor, and I suspect as a bit of an art-waif rescuer, that he is known and respected in the Squat and more widely in Paris as well.
I first set foot inside the Squat on a clammy early spring day to meet my American friend Kit Brown who had a studio there and with whom I was to have a show in Berlin a couple of weeks hence. Rather than hooking up later in Germany for the show, as we had planned at first, he invited me to stop in Paris in order to frame up our works in his studio. As you may imagine, this was a great savings for me and so later, our framing completed, I got a car and acted as art transport through the northlands to Berlin. Kit and his girlfriend Gaelle transported by night train later.
End Part One
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