I lose my sense of time when I’m in my studio. Paris is loud and crowded with people, but here it’s peaceful. There’s something magical about the place, something inner-sanctum-y about it. I love being here at dusk. The city lights bleed in through the big skylight. The shadows alter the pictures and a whiff of mystery pervades the place. My favourite time for working is at night. The summer gets me down because it means waiting a little longer each day for darkness to fall.

The studio isn’t far from the centre. The area used to be arty but now it’s pretty gentrified. We have a word for it: “Bobo”, bourgeois bohème. I stumbled on the area many years ago. You can’t afford a place like this in Paris anymore. At the time, 25 years ago, I was looking for a small place where I could paint because my flat was too tiny. I started phoning round a list of properties and by mistake I dialled one number twice. The guy couldn’t understand why I was repeating my enquiry about a studio, but I was persistent and suddenly he went: “Hang on, something’s just come in! 150 metres square. Do want to view it?” It was a no-brainer. A complete stroke of luck. It’s the kind of place everyone wants. Without that bit of luck, I’d probably never have found something like this.

My kitchen is like a boat. You go up the stairs and it’s like you’re in a bunk. When it rains, you can hear it pattering on the glass roof just above you. I like to cook. in fact, the kitchen was where I learned to compose music. The dishes that I ate in Lebanon as a child tutored me in the art of composing. When you add a spice, you change everything. Composition is the same. I can taste music on the tongue. DELIRIO tastes of lemon and ginger. The sour taste and the hot spice are transformed into vibrations.
I also hear music in colours. To my mind DELIRIO is a blue fading into white, almost silver, like the light of a full moon on the surface of the sea. Cold, but with an interior sultry touch. I’m not trying to fuse my art with my music. My two sides dovetail with each other quite naturally anyway; they’re two different sides of my energy. In either mode I’m exploring new spaces – spiritual spaces, not physical. When I’m composing, time crawls. It may take me three days to write two bars of music. The energy behind the painting process is quick and thrusting. I wrote DELIRIO down in my studio amidst my pictures. That was new for me. Normally I write scores in another room. Who knows, maybe the piece needed the energy from the light that’s there.

I left Lebanon during the war. In my first years in France I was very homesick. And then when I was back in Lebanon, I found I was missing Paris. There came a time when I realised that I felt most at ease when I was between two places – on a plane, say, travelling rather than arriving. Today I’m at home in my work. I work all around the world, so I’m always carrying my home with me. Obviously that only works on the composition side of things; when I’m painting I do need a fixed place. But I also have a studio in Lebanon and it feels really good working there. The path that led to my current places was a long one, but now I feel at home everywhere.