I remember him really well, painting barefoot.
I would come from the UN school to go to my mother’s gallery. I hadn’t gotten into Bronx Science yet. I would wear these Agnes B. mini skirts and cropped sweatshirts with pearl snaps. Yellow boots — a white stripe down the center — like Doc Martens, but not. I had been taking myself to school on the train since I was ten years old. I was very, very independent.
I would take the train and get off on Prince Street. My mother would be very busy in the back office, so I would stay at the front desk, doing homework, staring out the big windows.
Jean-Michel would be downstairs. There was a huge staircase with a green banister with big knobs. I would open the back door of the gallery and go say hi.
He would have papers all over the floor, xerox copies of his work. So many sentences would fly out at me — “Peso Neto,” “arroz con pollo,” "lead."
He was always there; he had a very soft voice, with a smile from the inside. It was strange because he was a grown-up, but he was somebody really familiar, so I didn’t need to explain anything.
The people around him were Rammellzee — who I didn’t really understand but who was not there much, just when he did a show. She did do a show for him too; his long metal paintings about future refugee warfare. But I remember my mom being mad at Rammellzee and then Jean-Michel, and being upset about them.
I remember him always happy. The very first time I met him was when his father Gerard and Nora took us (me and my mom) to this fancy chicken restaurant on the Upper East Side. I remember it was a 'chicken restaurant' because it was American, and I ordered chicken.
I was a kid, so it was a big deal for me to go to a restaurant with an artist, mother, and father. I had been to many restaurants in Italy or during art fairs, but I had never gone with a family — like a mother and father — who seemed very proper and organized and friendly. The chairs were round chairs with rungs, like half moons, with yellow wood, and the lighting was very dark and the walls were red.
Back at the gallery, I remember feeling very comfortable when he was around. On Saturdays, I would be around him all day. He would come up to get something from Dean and DeLuca. He had linen pants on, with leather sandals — very chic — and it’s strange because I thought he was wearing an Armani suit, a grey one. (But in your film, I found out he later wore Comme des Garçons.) The jacket was buttoned up, no shirt underneath — really beautiful and nondescript.
I remember collectors would come by, and they made jingling noises with jewelry or sparkled with overly enthusiastic smiles.
Mainly, I remember my mother was really loud on the phone in the back, speaking with her accent on fire, usually screaming “NO” or “WHAT?” and then laughing as broadly as her yells were loud.
Then I remember when my mother found him the space on Crosby Street behind the gallery. It was sad when he moved because the basement was so bright, like this big bright elephant’s ribcage. His canvases would start off white. The sunlight would come streaming inside — the back wall was sloped like a greenhouse, made of many panels of windows.
You mentioned his art was not as much about aesthetics as it was about ideas. But to me, it was an encyclopedia of aesthetics. It was as if he was filtering all of art history through his art.
As if the X axis was history — starting from the birth of the earth, the Mesopotamians, the Romans, and then colonization, Haiti, to now.
The Y axis was form — the form that the art could take — from frescoes on ancient Roman villas, to Matisse cutouts, to Caravaggio portraits, to huge paintings by Goya about the French Revolution, to Christ paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, to urinals by Duchamp, to Aztec art.
Then the Z axis, which was all his personal memories — the emotional life he would filter: superheroes, or hearing Charlie Parker, or reading The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, or crime novels, and then all the broken hearts and joys of life.
So his paintings would exist at the intersection of these three planes. You could be studying a still life, while processing the invention of the cotton gin, while contemplating what it means to be loyal.
Then, add this to the art-making process: the fact that while you are making art, you are listening to Ravel, or Fab Five Freddy, or even better, coming up with music yourself. Then, you put on sneakers because you don't like the bathroom downstairs; you run upstairs. Or you want to take a shower, then you run back downstairs. Your high tops got dirt on them — from the dirt on the stairs — which you have trailed back downstairs, so it’s now landed on your work.
Does that make sense? So Jean-Michel's paintings from my mother’s gallery, for example, could be about Las Meninas, Twombly, and memory. As much as he was writing visual poetry, he was painting time-space portraits.
This was also art for art’s sake; the doors were chosen because they were proportional — otherwise, he could have been writing on bricks.
Anyway, back to my memories. We were in Italy, sitting in the back of the car, and my mother was driving. He was showing me all his Polaroids, telling me about the models he liked the most, the girl he had the biggest crush on. I didn't know what to say — the girls were a lot older than me. Then we started talking about Central Park and spending time in Sheep's Meadow. We compared the fronts of our arms. He had his left leg crossed, looking out the open window.
Except my mother started to interrupt and talk to him about not going to Modena, or something about not doing a show in Modena and how she didn’t want him to give the paintings to the dealer Emilio Mazzoli. She was always right. My mom wanted to protect Jean-Michel. She sold them carefully — never for profit — it was always about spreading the work to important collectors and museums for the history of art.
She was a teacher.
I remember she had to scream this and turn her head. The sea was blowing in from Via Aurelia. I felt so lucky he wanted to sit with me, but she had to scream into the wind. Plus, he was listening to mixtapes.
He stayed with us at my mother’s house at the beach. He usually did his own thing, and for me, that was a big deal because I was terrified of my mother, so it made a big impression that he would insist on his way.
He liked Rome, also.
I also remember going to Los Angeles to see his first show at Larry Gagosian.
At that point, my memory of him shifts to me really contemplating his art, seeing all those paintings I knew by heart. Looking up at Famous Negro Athletes, I learned about "exceptionalism" — the painting showed the concept. A tribute that looked like a "line-up."
I would step into them — seeing my mother on the phone with the huge black painting, the white crown figure in the center. She had this huge rectangular wooden desk, and the painting seemed to be made just to sit right behind her. It was as long as the wall — as if he was saying, “OK, don’t mess with her."
Anyway, this is what it was like for me to know him as a kid.
