MY STORY

Born in Paris, formed by paintings

I was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in 1969, nine days before the launch of Apollo 11. My first conscious encounter with art came at the 1979 Chardin exhibition at the Grand Palais, where I stood in front of his dead rabbits, transfixed by the soft light on the fur.

A cousin of my maternal grandmother, the antique dealer Jacques "Jacquot" Soustiel, specialized in Islamic and Ottoman art and lived in Paris across the street from my grandparents. He patiently taught a twelve-year-old boy to read rugs, ceramics, and objects: a plate showing Suleiman the Magnificent offering a tulip to a Greek princess, and a scrap of a pope's chasuble whose weight I still feel in my hands.

School was harder. Shy, nerdy, bad at sports, and privileged, I made an ideal target, and I spent most of my childhood afraid of other children.

Politics as a spectator sport

There was no television in my parents' apartment, so I learned politics through the radio. In 1981, Reagan and Mitterrand were elected within months of each other. I began taking notes during Sunday-evening political interviews, cataloguing the standard answers politicians give. I came to see the political interview as an art form, and the journalist who could make a powerful man uncomfortable as more powerful than the man himself. In 1987, Gary Hart's withdrawal from the Democratic primary drew me to American politics for good.

Painter, then not

In 1988, a book on twentieth-century art revealed a world my conservative household had dismissed. Newman, Rothko, Twombly, Kelly, and Fontana struck me most; Gilbert & George for their corrosive humor, Rauschenberg for his political eye. I began painting in December 1988, canvases spread flat on my bed. I spent hours at the Centre Pompidou, nose inches from the paint. In 1989, I arrived at my own pattern: a golden-ratio black rectangle with a small notch, a singularity, in the lower right corner.

Under a rigid paternal expectation that art was not a career, I completed an engineering degree while studying the philosophy of art at Paris Nanterre, then constitutional law and political science at Sciences Po (1995–1997). By then I had painted about fifty canvases and three hundred drawings. In 1999, I became district chief of staff to Laurent Fabius, then President of the National Assembly. I saw raw political power up close, and I left after less than a year. In 2000, I painted a farewell triptych, Humiliation, Soumission, Domination, and stopped.

Other lives

I joined the French civil service, specializing in economic relations with China, then moved to Shanghai in 2007 to publish a luxury travel magazine. In 2013, I moved to New York, where I continued in magazine publishing, and I became a U.S. citizen in 2023.

A second beginning

In 2017, I turned my media skills toward the questions I could no longer ignore in New York: systemic discrimination, white privilege, women's rights. I founded a production company (Legit Prod LLC) and launched the interview series The Face of America. The people I interviewed changed me.

In 2018, I returned to the rectangle and put words inside it. On May 26, 2021, I minted my first NFT on Tezos. It sold in seventy-four minutes to an anonymous collector, my first sale ever.

Text as medium

My work is text-based conceptual art. I use language both as an aesthetic medium and as an analytical tool, and I write in the clinical register of a report: flat, without a main verb, withholding moral commentary. My subjects are the anxious middle class, civil servants, immigrants, and ordinary Americans dreaming of a better life while tied to mundane tasks. Each piece exposes a form of dominance, overt or subtle, and sets the promise of the American Dream against the reality of a Tuesday.

Series such as ORDNANCE (2023–2026), which renders public data in the visual language of a fighter-jet HUD, and FEDERAL PROCESS, whose portraits are reduced to a single noun phrase, apply a documentary method to American life. My books include Thirty-Six (2023) and Super Leftist Poetry (2025); HADRIAN, a satire co-written with AI, appeared from Publick Occurrences in 2026.

My work belongs to the permanent collections of the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art in New York, the Mad Arts Museum in South Florida, the Tezos Foundation, the NFT Museum in Newberry, South Carolina, and the VERSEverse gallery. I have taught Public Relations and Media at New York University as an adjunct professor since 2020.