Any other business

The first time I saw any work by Louis Fratino was nearly four years ago, when Antoine Lévi was showing some at Paris Internationale, the 'emerging art fair' that usually takes place at the same time as the 'posher' FIAC. I've often regretted I didn't buy the little Man on a Swing that caught my eye at the time. The one that got away: Man on a Swing Since then, I've visited Antoine Lévi's other exhibitions of Fratino's work, and bought a couple of pastel drawings. His pastels, paintings, drawings and even ceramics often visibly feature scenes from gay life, including explicitly sexual ones, but they are generally quiet and domestic in tone, a restful change from aggressive, hectoring, 'Spartist' contemporary art. You never get the feeling you're being beaten into submission with insistent identity politics. Today I went to see Growths of the Earth , Fratino's latest solo show at what's now Ciaccia Levi Paris. It was interesting t...

This is the clafoutis straight out of the oven, before being sprinkled with sugar Clafoutis , originally from the Limousin region, is traditionally a black-cherry batter pudding, but people use the same simple technique to make it with various kinds of fruit*. What makes it especially easy is that there's no pastry case: clafoutis is basically sweet Yorkshire pudding with fruit, a toad-in-the-hole with fruit where the sausages would usually be. I do make it with cherries when they're in season, though in Paris cherries with any flavour aren't easy to find and if you find them you'll pay through the nose. I also make it with apricots, or in winter, pears. But this weekend a friend had given me a bunch of garden rhubarb, a fruit I can't resist, so I used that. Typically, you need about 700 or 800g of fruit. Begin early by cutting the rhubarb into chunks and mixing it, in a bowl, with 50g of sugar. I used demerara this time. I also added a couple of tablespoons of va...

A few days ago, I went to see the Pinault Collection's opening exhibition at the newly-renovated and reopened Bourse de Commerce. It was good to see that, for this opening exhibition - actually called Ouverture - the curators didn't just go for a massive show of billionaire purchasing-power: big, glossy, hugely expensive, boring works that look like they were made specially for sale to tycoons. There was perhaps some of that - I really don't get Bertrand Lavier, who filled the ground-floor glass cases, or for that matter Martial Raysse, who opens the whole show with a big painting just inside the entrance. But the upstairs selection mixes art-world stars with young artists just starting out and others somewhere in-between, not always to the youngsters' advantage. As an example, Luc Tuymans (another one whose fame is beyond my understanding) is shown with Miriam Cahn, a Swiss artist, and Antonio Obá, a Brazilian born in 1983. Urs Fischer's monumental installation, ...