York he’d visited Rothko, I couldn’t have been more impressed by him. I was also fascinated by the fact that Éric, in addi-tion to working with these artists, printed and edited works by comic book artists and illustrators. At the time, I was also working as an illustrator to earn my liv-ing while painting on the side, and I had just read with interest the catalog of the High and Low exhibition that had recently taken place at MoMA (it was in 1990). In short, this exhibition forged connections between scholarly and popular culture. Suffice it to say that what was being cre-ated at L’Atelier resonated strongly with my preoccupations of the time.

In fact, I kind of knew Éric even before I met him. When I was fifteen or six-teen and still in high school, my sister was a student at the Arts déco (School of Decorative Arts) where Éric was one of her professors. On my end, I was design-ing posters for a cinema festival, and my sister suggested that I come print my posters secretly, in the evening, at Éric’s workshop at the school. When I told him this story about ten or twenty years later (he hadn’t noticed anything at the time), he found it quite amusing.

Éric was open to experimentation. Most of the work that we did together was based upon the idea that the individual proofs should all be different artworks instead of identical prints. We achieved this by rotating the sheet of paper 90 or 180 degrees between the printing of two colors, by omitting or repeating a color, or by changing the color between each printing so that unique artworks would be produced from similar screens. It wasn’t easy, but I think (I hope!) he had fun doing this. The last project that we worked on was particularly complex:

seven landscapes on a canvas measuring 150 × 300 cm, with variations obtained through an interplay of screens. I don’t think we fully appreciate the extent to which Éric devoted himself to each project, and to the artists. We don’t fully appreciate all that he accomplished, working patiently, ritually, in complete harmony with his machine.

At the end of the day and before clos-ing the grey door, he’d call out his usual “Allez !” (as he also would on the phone, as a way of saying good-bye). I under-stood it as an invitation to keep going, to patiently and ritually persevere, just like him. And that “Allez !” has stayed with me over the years.

Paul Cox, November 2024