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This is a portrayal of four territories created by pathways; the corners revealing different worlds, different choices. One’s hesitation to dive into one of these paths is illustrated by the pen’s dallying and the colours rubbed in with the finger. We model our laws according to our certainties, but knowing this is presumptuous for someone who is hiding behind writing.

Two worlds, two sets of assumptions, two sets of logic go head to head on each side of an enormous balancing pole. The knife that determines the balancing point is cluttered with endless calls for reassessment. The fruit of these digressions is harassing the correct equilibrium of the thing and the whole is bumbling along sailing off into the universe. Every form of loneliness leads to heaven!

Here, some anthropologists are on the lookout. Every clue is important and they are painstakingly examining the tracks left in the clay by a bird’s feet, the scents lingering along Lovers’ Lane as do the things created by man, haunting the research site like fetishes … but good times spent together will always be inscrutable!

“Marriage is like a fortress under siege”, says a Chinese proverb. Those on the outside want to get in and those on the inside want to get out! Shown on this canvas is the wishful thinking of a friend who does not yet know that destruction can bring intense enjoyment. Since that time, fire has invaded the noonday sky, life has returned with fervour and everything is renewed!

Between my mouth and yours, the pathways are interlaced like with a Virginia creeper. The early-morning sun has taken off our dark glasses and on the truck an out-of-tune piano reigns over the disgrace. The coffee has lost its smell, we have taken all the space. You have set the table from earth to heaven so I may stay here. The birds are laughing their heads off. It’s really great.

When you’re not there, life’s a shambles. It doesn’t have this sense of rightness that marks each step of the folly of people who climb trees; nor does it have the sweetness of the well where you expect to find water, where you can see for ever. When you’re not there, it’s wartime with nowhere safe to go, the little scrap of a scrap of something at the bottom of an old pocket that’s waiting for the holy spirit as daylight is awaited when sleep is over.

Landing is the most dangerous part of an aeroplane journey. Landing and twilight are very bad bedfellows, and children whose fathers are pilots flee from this fear by giving it a happy face after having buried it in a secret corner. In our private life a struggle is taking place where truth, which does not have the role of a funeral wreath, is foremost.

When I was little I lived in an unreal world where people and things appeared and disappeared at the whim of days and circumstances. I especially remember my mother, looming gently out of the darkness, when one night, in Algeria, an earthquake had taken my bed right into the middle of the room. That day there came something out of the blue.

José had a joy and an obvious good nature about him which went well with his fascination for time’s daily procession. He was a happy man. At night, he made dentures and that night I was pencil-sketching beside him while listening to the continuous flow of his thoughts. The world that he was ceaselessly redrafting seemed like paradise and we yearned to stay there.

Aludes are large ants with wings used to attract thrushes into traps. This is how poachers in Provence trap these little creatures in holm oak woodlands. From them they make a pâté that is so delicious that it makes you feel tipsy, they say. The Narcissus (the hunter) is torturing nature (the pâté) in order to give it a meaning (delicious)!

One year after the Fukushima disaster, with life getting back to normal, some Japanese people felt like being a bit frivolous. So they organised a dance with some marshmallows and straightaway their faces beamed with joy again. The moral of this story is that you must be quick to eat the marshmallows before there are none left!

In order to exchange things of real value, we need access to our secret garden and there to choose something we prize in order to give it in exchange for what we desire. It is a great privilege to have access to intimacy by making exchanges. In so doing we find for example: gold coins, a kiss, cinema seats, a few obsessions, a wonderful dream… In short: something must be sacrificed!

“My life was a joke! ” said a famous Japanese architect. People make up loads of arguments so as not to be seen… Just like the opera singer Maria Callas who never felt like going on stage and used to stand in the wings in terror before being pushed out towards her audience! Courage is not a figment of the imagination. It feeds on fragile souls.

Friendship is not negotiable, like the one growing between two beings who, through spending time together, each day push back the borders of the worlds in which they live. “Because it was him ; because it was me” Montaigne used to say … It is also when the rules bestowed on movements no longer matter and when time stops running out.

For most children going on holiday means: living as a family at last! It is a privilege soon forgotten by those who are deprived of this festive procession so as not to have to measure the binges that elude them! But … getting away from measuring, isn’t that also a bit like having a holiday?

The merry-go-round is a place of obsessions. Going round and round turning away from myself, finding that I end up back with you turning round to be with me… Raptures of the deep are a strategic choice clearly linked to survival. Going without them is not an option and, by way of a hint, it’s when it starts again that it’s sublime!

Certain cluttered minds demand that women remain confined to their beds, their houses or at best their fields! So it is that in certain parts of the world a woman is worth roughly three pigs and in others they are slaves. But some valiant women have broken free and gone into business, and the prices have gone up, leaving the pigs far behind!

Let’s dive into the nooks and crannies of a large delta bathed in light and colours, then let’s observe the little fish and their predators. As the little fish get bigger, those that survive migrate towards greater depths and embrace the open sea, a place with no address, fishing grounds… There is always a predator to point out the way to growth!

Turning up just as lighting effects sometimes are suddenly there, the creature was wanting to be petted, but its rider needed to be sure! Would the nag keep going all the way through this mission which involved singing and dancing all night long? As fortune would have it, the creature could play the accordion brilliantly… and is playing it so well that now it’s still dancing!

The sun is rising, huge and solitary, appearing out of the mountain. The fire that it is spreading is chasing the night away to the far reaches of the other life, the one on the other side, where the other person is, the one that you have lost and think you will never find again! Once out of the abyss, the star takes its place, the day may begin… despite which, the lovers are not sharing their distress!

The office is a very special living space. All over the world, this place remains for ever serious and respectable. This is where the seat of power is! What is cooked up here is sacred, from war to wanting some sweeties. Everything is organised here, even whether it will rain or shine … that says how important it is!

The Feast of Booths was the only feast that remained after Jesus reorganised the religious customs of his time. He filed things into a vacuum and that didn’t please everybody! He was promptly blacklisted and ended up nailed to a cross so as to dissuade any other dissenters. But in vain, and in spite of the grinding-down effect dear to each and every torturer, there was no shortage of courage!

Cypresses are tall, pointed trees that, according to the Romans, guided heaven-ward the souls of the dead. The ancestors of the Italians used to bury their dead alongside roads, at the feet of these Cupressaceae which had been planted there on purpose to show them the way. Today, with all these wars, death comes quickly all along roads, but there are no cypress trees to be found! How traditions die out!

“Anger is short-lived madness”, say the Chinese. When one thinks that the decisions that have forged our countries and families have for the most part come out of this blinding trance, it is no wonder we’ve become a band of neuropaths starved of care, compulsively reproducing the lessons that were previously drummed into us! … and that’s how freedom got confiscated.

Stuck studying and under the eagle eye of Pizzani, the general overseer, Little Pierre was unable to escape and slope off to the bar opposite where his friends were having a much more interesting time showing off and smoking cigarettes. Frustrated, lost in his thoughts, he imagined for a moment that Pizzani was falling into a large hole and finding himself in hospital!… and good heavens that’s what happened!

It is said that bad people are as nasty as ringworms: like those who have ringworm, a skin disease that causes terrible itchiness and makes people most irritable. On the other hand, people who are good and devoted friends are often called “as nice as pie”, but there is no corresponding illness to illustrate this state, not even sanctimoniousness!

This drawing was done during a telephone conversation. Who will explain this bolt of grey and pink lightning crossing a tiny little yellow carpet floating in the air where a sun is forcing its way in, supported by a leaf-chair, a box of hankies, clover hanging on curtain rails and some clumsy shadows? … Not I, said the Duck; Not I, said the Turkey … !

The specialists say that a love affair appears like a shooting star, is for ever and lasts until boredom sets in! Every now and then however, love and friendship go together so well that boredom finds itself pushed out! What the Dickens! An everlasting adventure, a limitless interest, an undying desire …so might the story of Ulysses and Penelope actually be true?

A ball game. Young and older children playing, bodies entangled on a white background. It’s a funny old game though: there is no grass, no trance, no apparent rules, only some dance steps, some sort of figment of the imagination.

Laura catches sight of Philippe in a graphics processing studio. They do not know each other. She hears him say that he has a heart condition and is going to settle down on a beach in Madagascar. She comes up to him and says that this suits her down to the ground, as it means that she’ll be able to look after him … Sometimes boredom sets in before anything has moved!