Walking up Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud in Paris’s 10th arrondissement in mid-October, I saw a man who was working in the doorframe of Ô Lieu de, a tapas, pizza and beer joint I’ve passed many a night. The restaurant’s front windows are tall and wide, and the man was trim and spry in black, wide-wale corduroy overalls with spots of white or grey paint.
Gregory Sévin, the man in the door, looked like a magic-worker, an elastic figure-eight, standing on a stepladder and leaning into his work.
Sévin designs and decorates the interiors of restaurants across France. Inside Lieu de, repurposed flat sticks of wood adorned the street-level bar. Cement slabs spiralled around a tree trunk, forming a staircase.
It led to a low-ceilinged lounge with slanted boughs of wood attached to two walls, and a larger, windowless back room with primitive-style wooden furniture and a painting of a female Axl Rose sucking on a lollipop.
The artist also showed me the first-floor bathroom, which he designed to resemble a cave with curvy stone walls and paintings of beasts.
Sévin told me he’s also worked on a restaurant called Chope-Moi in Pigalle and a place called Talkie Molkky not far from the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Sévin’s doing something at the Gare du Nord; he’s done something in the northwest French city of Lille, and in the Mediterranean town of Saint-Tropez.
He had his materials on the first floor of Lieu de, and American classic rock was playing from speakers that were probably connected to his laptop.
“I don’t look for work,” the artist told me. “I look to amuse myself.”
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