Alain Godon at the museum of Le Tou­quet tomor­row with his paint­ings and with his fans

Alain Godon at the museum of Le Tou­quet tomor­row with his paint­ings and with his fans

From tomor­row, the museum of Le Tou­quet is to open its doors for the exhi­bi­tion “Extrav­a­ganza” by the Tou­quet­tois artist, Alain Godon. One hun­dred and twenty of his paint­ings will be on show until 18 March. The artist will be there tomor­row to talk to visitors.

You should see him, hair in the wind, eyes sparkling, stand­ing among the pile of can­vases crammed into the museum of Le Tou­quet. All are his — over a hun­dred – and are the prod­uct of more than twenty years paint­ing. And he is exul­tant, as though he has just found all his old friends there. He stops in front of a paint­ing of the old div­ing pool at the seafront on a starry night. “A reminder of when I was young”, he recalls. We would party every night in Le Tou­quet and often conk out there, under the div­ing board, in the small hours of the morn­ing. This paint­ing, it shows what I saw there, lying on the sand … ” Another paint­ing of Le Tou­quet, of the Rue Saint-​Jean: in the fore­ground, a young man astride an Amer­i­can motor­bike with a girl on the back seat. “Yet another mem­ory. At the time, I had a bar, which you can see in the back­ground. And I went up and down the rue Saint-​Jean on my motor­bike …” You can usu­ally see Alain Godon tucked away in the cor­ner of many of his paint­ings: walk­ing the dog on a New York street; draw­ing on the pave­ment out­side the Lou­vre. “My bohemian period. I really did that when I was young to keep from starving …”