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  These ' involtini ' are something I had for lunch one day in a hotel in Milan, and started making myself back home. They're easy to make, just a bit fiddly. They're fried aubergine slices rolled round ham and mozzarella, i.e. one aubergine slice makes one roll, and I usually get four slices out of the middle of an aubergine, leaving the unused sides later to make Turkish ' patlıcan kızartma ' (as I make it, ' patlıcan kızartma ' is just chunks of aubergine and sweet pepper fried till tender, turned out, juice and all, on to a bed of yogurt flavoured for an hour or so with crushed garlic, and garnished with sumac and chopped parsley). I think you could count two ' involtini ' per person for a starter, three for a main course. In Milan, they were served with tomato sauce but I don't bother. They make a nice juice of their own as they bake. So, you slice the aubergines lengthwise and fry the slices in olive oil until they're starting to br...

Romainville is one of the old industrial suburbs that stretch out north of Paris along the Canal de l'Ourcq. It is now forging ahead, as part of a broader regional plan, with an ambitious, even spectacular transformation project, focusing on what's called the Quartier de l'Horloge. This project includes the creation, on the abandoned sites and in the empty but listed art-déco buildings of the now-departed pharmaceutical industry, of what's meant to become one of Europe's biggest contemporary and performing arts complexes. Already, a couple of years or more back, pre-Covid, a handful of intrepid Paris galleries moved out to ' Komunuma ', on a site re-designed by the Freaks architectural agency for Fiminco, a property developer with its own arts foundation . Five miles from central Paris and a good quarter-hour's walk from the nearest métro station, surrounded by rubble, mud and bulldozers, they must have wondered what they'd got themselves into, esp...

Last weekend I took the train up to Amsterdam to visit the Rijksakademie's 2022 Open Studios, my first time back there since 2019. You go to this event expecting to discover, in a single visit, the world's most promising young artists all in one place, before they hit the market and achieve fame and shoot beyond your price range. Inevitably, the reality falls short. This year, I felt stupid and obvious and unimaginative - lame's the word, I guess - as my two favourite 'booths' by far were, at opposite ends of the event (studio n°2 and studio n°37, tucked away upstairs before the corridor leading to the bookshop and exit), my own friends'. In studio n°2, Ali Eslami ('Mr October' in a calendar of Men of the Rijksakademie produced by one of the residents) had mounted a simple but perfect, professional video installation, nothing more than a large custom screen, set at just the right angle and brilliantly backlit in red, a bench to sit on, and a steel struc...

I've been a bit lazy with art of late, so to start making up for lost time, today I went to two exhibitions focusing mainly on artists born in the 90s. Both were in places I'd never visited before. I started at the Studio des Acacias, which is showing Des Corps Libres - une jeune scène française, a Reiffers Art initiative curated by Thibaut Wychowanok. I found Salomé Chatriot's HD videos and big, glossy print on Perspex quite interesting. There was also a very seductive little painting, in fact tiny, of a young man carrying a big black dog. And there was a spectacular piece called Holy Hole by Pol Taburet, 2022 winner of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize . I often tell people one of the problems with buying art by good young artists is that they soon get even better but by then are beyond my price range. Knowing that, I should have bought something when Ali Hasanzadeh put together Pol Taburet's first exhibition at Balice Hertling's Belleville space, instead of he...