What exactly is art and what constitutes art practice? What is the nature of a commitment to making art and what exactly is the measure of the trajectory of this commitment, sometimes implausibly referred to as a career, as if an artist were simply a lawyer in a bad suit with a taste for roughing it ....?

We are absolutely terrified of solitude, of sitting alone in a room and making things - things made for no one but ourselves out of personal inquiry or a few rounds with our personal demons. We eviscerate solitude with a endless number of rapidly appearing and disappearing electronic devices and distractions: a world made to order for the career-minded artist, the university graduate who judges his or her work by its similarity to the surrounding milieu. We are very jumpy these days, and have a hard time concentrating. We are on deadline, and must supply product - nearly all of it to be entered into an online database, where it has no physical reality, or weight, and can disappear at a moment's notice.

Nevertheless, the room is sitting there, waiting - if only in the back of our mind. If we never enter we will never find out what waits there for us.

I want to know what it means to create for myself, to forget about everything except what intrigues me, to follow something as far as it goes, even if it takes years and is ignored, or is not judged a success by those "in the know," those happy ones sitting in the cubicles in shiny office towers making deals on the phone or via email. Those who know what culture is and control the flow of information, which is the flow of work that looks substantially similar to everything else. Hooked as we all are, we still admit that this world will never produce a Rousseau (whichever one you prefer), a Beaudelaire, a Henry Miller or Anais Nin, a Simone de Beauvoir, a Picasso or Robert Rauschenberg. And yet it surges endlessly forward like a tsunami collecting everything in its path.

(Very impressive people, no doubt - just look at the publishing world, staffed by unsalaried interns and smart people demanding sequels to last year's Not-Too-Bad book and putting all their energy into the deadline for the next sales conference. There's that word again - deadline - what does it means to work without one?)

I think of my friend Pierre Louaver. I think of him being shuttled from studio to studio, pushed by his landlord from one secret apartment to another, in none of which he can legally establish his residence - where he unpacks, sets out his belongings and his tools and proceeds, for the umpteenth time, to create a private universe inside of which he can think and paint canvases.

There is a photograph, too, that sticks in my mind - I cannot find it anywhere. Not of Louaver but no matter. A bare studio, an empty room - except for one large canvas leaning against the wall. If memory serves there is a star figure painted in the lower right corner of the canvas - nothing else. And in the shadows, an old man sitting in a canvas chair, a cup of coffee at his feet, staring at the wall and the canvas that nearly covers it, and thinking.

Louaver's project - if that's the right word for it - does not seems so overwhelming or startling at first go. You will immediately lose interest if I describe it in words: an endless series of doors opening and closing, painted on silk and synthetic materials, canvases ranging in size from seven feet by twelve to small paintings eight inches by ten, in which the figure of the door, painted on a transparent color field, is very small indeed - no bigger than the palm of your hand.

This endless series of theme and variations Louaver has attended to for many years with increasing subtlety of form and color. And yet it is useless to describe them. One has to see them, to stand in their presence - to have four or five of these paintings facing you from walls on several sides of the room - if they are going to have the desired effect: to transport you to another world - a still, silent place of entrances and departures, of half-open doors on all sides, whose range of color induces a kind of musical encounter.

If Rothko's Chapel was meant to overwhelm the viewer with the force, the religious essence of color, Louaver's private spaces create a thinking ambience, a seduction that catches you unaware.

(I know whereof I speak. After one of his many moves, Louaver let me carry two of his paintings off to my (needless to say, illegal) abode. I put them up in the most public area of the loft. Voilà! A transformation. Suddenly this was the room where conversation happened, where people sat and talked and forgot about time. Once the paintings left, it was back to the usual mad parties.)

Louaver belongs to the great tradition of the solitaries who make art for themselves, who do not esteem it based on its success but by whether it intrigues them. To be a success as a work of art, it must be a problem, a conundrum that fascinates the creator - that grips him. I am tempted to say that this sort of working in solitude, world-be-damned is a very French tradition - I suppose I am thinking of Alexei Brodavitch's book of French painters holed up in their studios, from the most famous to the most obscure - but one can think of artists from all over the world who have followed this path, from Hokusai being kicked out of one apartment after another to the French and Spanish surrealists who barely escaped Europe at the dawn of Fascism only to be dispersed over the face of the globe. Not to mention the modern painters of the Indian subcontinent or the artists in Iran who paint secretly and under terrible pressure. Artists who continue to create in utter obscurity.

In any case, it is a pleasure to mention the heroism of French artists if only for the hackles it will raise in my country, where the managers of Official Ignorance have brainwashed the population to spit at the sound of the word France. An operation so skilfully done that no one from the talking head on TV to the idiot waiter pouring French wine down the toilet realizes they have become lab rats in a gruesome experiment.

Needless to say, Louaver has scant on-line presence - he either never gets around to it or couldn't care less - but you can see a photograph of one of his paintings on this site, and a few others on the links attached.

He is long overdue for an exhibition in New York. The show will be quietly noticed, and ignored. His work is that most trendy and vacuous of art appelations, conceptual, except that it requires your body and your intelligence to engage with it. There are no sledgehammers in his art, no statements, no clever references.

I don't have the slightest clue why he stays, I don't understand why he doesn't buy a car and head out west. The Southwest is waiting for him, as is the Grand Coulee Dam, San Francisco, the Mississippi and the Sangre de Cristo mountains - not to mention Hong Kong, Honolulu and Melbourne. He has never checked out Chickamauga. Is Chickamauga worth checking out? Is Chicago a good town for art? The denizens of New York, who hold on to their existence like kitchen help on a cruise ship loaded with bankers (do they think the bankers will share the lifeboats?), will never know because they will never budge. The myth of New York has infected them.

Perhaps Louaver stays because he thrives on the equanimity of being just like anyone else in the street, an unknown agent in a vast hive speaking 120 different human tongues. He is, to steal a phrase, "a man of the cities," and for that New York, the ersatz European metropolis, is perfect. He stays, despite the long, exhausting hours at physical labor unconnected to his art, and despite having one landlord or another breathing down his neck. He does it even though Berlin and its many advantages are not so far away. Does he do it because Chinatown, with its raucous food stalls and elderly Confucians chatting in their habitual spots, is five minutes over the Manhattan Bridge by bike, and from there it's a short distance to the Lower East Side or Battery Park, with its boats incessantly departing and returning and its great wallops of ocean air? European that he is, this is his exotic landscape.

Even so, I ask myself why he sticks it out. Perhaps behind the unruffled exterior he is a little heedless, a little crazy, a little given to manias? Every man has something he hides. (I can just see Louaver smiling when he hears that. "Just one, James?") Perhaps it is because if something were easy, it would have no interest for him.