Standing within the prospect of belief

Yesterday I sent a brief email about the artist to someone I have known for over twenty years. In the email I mentioned a gallery this someone knows, which happens also to be one the artist likes - basically, they have a bright white new space and the normally reticent artist wishes to approach them about the prospect of a show there. As background, the man I was emailing is someone I first met across the ocean when he was in full swing as a kind of dashing physicist-cum-artist, though I had seen him from a distance a few years earlier when as a curator and art dealer he was touring this continent with some rappish and bejewelled graffiti artists. In fact, one summer, memorably for me, I had nowhere to stay in the aforementioned manic city across the ocean and this person gave me keys to their ground-floor apartment in an old industrial building close to the water: a kind of vacant bohemian hot-spot full of stepladders, paintings, Richard Ellmann biographies, and Norwegian rats (Rattus norvegicus). The next time I heard from him, a year or so later, he was in the mountains on an entirely different continent. (Time passes. Two wars.) Then - all of a sudden - he was in this country, dabbling not in paintings but in music. Now - all change again - he is still in this country but helping run a continental wing of the largest contemporary art database in the world. I must confess, I love people who roam the planet with ungovernable relish and individualistic industry, leaping with their chameleon feet from project to project, even field to field. Their sometimes dashing natures are what grant life colour - if colour is your thing - and as a result can make life more inhabitable. A good looking man with elaborate tastes, and pinpointing manners, he is a good ally for the artist to have. This is why I am delighted to report that in his reply to me today he thought the gallerist mentioned made perfect sense for the artist and said he knew him well enough to arrange an introduction. This, with our fingers crossed, he will do when he returns to the capital, after touring the two major cities of the sometimes chilly north.