"Camel or Michel - it doesn't matter"

One might get the idea that everything is just a game for him. A game he's so passionate about, perhaps, because he's so desperate to win. Kamel Mennour, who loves football as much as he loves art, is a winner. If he were on the field himself, he would be a striker, no question. He's fast, always on the move, and seems to be everywhere at once. Paris, Cologne, Basel, Shanghai? He's always on the go, but never gone for long.

On this Sunday in autumn, when the Paris art fair opens in a few days, the Paris gallery owner has a lot to do. Mennour, short graying hair and rimless glasses, is standing in the lobby of the Petit Palais, once the exhibition pavilion for the Paris World Fair of 1900 and now the Museum of Fine Arts, and is making his way on the phone. He is tall, enormous by French standards, and high above his elegant physique float life-size figures, sky blue and printed with white fleecy clouds. "Burn Shine Fly" is the name of the work by Ugo Rondinone. Burn, shine, fly. The Swiss is one of 43 artists represented by Mennour. Maybe it's better to say whose coach he is. He wants to take her to the top. He also picked up a few at their peak and picked them up. But this is another story.

At the back of the Petit Palais, workers are building a barrel of charred wood many meters high. Another installation by Rondinone. Shortly before, Mennour checked on the Place Vendôme, where the German-Polish conceptual artist Alicja Kwade placed huge marble spheres or integrated them into concrete stairs between the "Hôtel Ritz" and the showcases of the world's most expensive jewelers. The square from the time of Louis XIV suddenly has something of the labyrinths of M.C. Escher. It looks as if you could touch the huge balls with a finger and set them in motion. A mirage, no question. 586 kilograms is the weight of a marble ball. Art weighs heavily these days.

Kamel Mennour is one of the greats of the global art scene. He has four galleries in Paris, several hundred square meters of exhibition space, over 50 employees and turns over tens of millions every year. Why is he doing all this to himself, why is he speeding through Paris on his electric folding bike, which his employees recently gave him for his 57th birthday, from one installation to the next, on Sunday before he has a meal in honor of him in the evening organized by Alicja Kwade, the marble ball artist who is celebrated everywhere?

"It's the labor inspector in me," Mennour says, laughing. In truth, it's a token of love: always present, always approachable, always making the artists feel like they're starring. "Gallery owners are intermediaries," explains Mennour. "They don't do much, but what they do they have to do right." He calls it commitment.

Kamel Mennour is enthusiastic and a natural at communication. He could certainly sell carpets too. When French President Emmanuel Macron stopped by his stand at the Paris trade fair, the two talked to each other like old friends. They hold hands and pat each other on the back. A hip writer once wrote about Macron that he could seduce a chair. This also applies to the gallery owner, who is on first name terms with everyone after ten minutes.

It is no longer possible to get a seat in the garden of the Petit Palais. Mennour doesn't mind taking a seat on the stone steps. Two employees joined. Sylvie Patry is part of the group, she is chief conservator of the Musée d'Orsay, number two in the big house, but soon part of the Mennours team. The news hit the Parisian art scene like a bomb. Big galleries and private foundations are buying the best people out of museums. A transfer market, a mercato, like in football. It was only in May that Mennour appointed Christian Alandete from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation as his scientific director.

Mennour gets coffee and water, breaks up the brownies into small, bite-sized pieces for everyone. The role of father and provider, he himself admits, is his favourite. He met his German wife Annika at Club Med. He was 22 at the time, she was not 17. They have now been married for 34 years. Mennour spent Sunday morning helping his daughters Mia and Kija with the housework. And if it wasn't for the art fair, he would now be at the climbing park with his youngest son Elyas, eight years old. On weekdays he takes him to school. With the cargo bike. That is “essential”, more important than anything else.

Mennour is a family man, you can meet the father of five children at parents' evenings, sometimes he invites his children's classmates to the gallery or has them build works of art out of fruit crates. When his firstborn son, Kayen, now 20, spent months in children's hospital as an infant until doctors found out what he had, the father vowed to say thank you one day. He has just organized an art auction for the fourth time for the benefit of the Imagin research institute for rare hereditary diseases and presented the scientists with eight million euros.

Mennour does not drink alcohol and is a vegetarian. Not a portrait of him that doesn't portray him as a friendly man, not a portrait in France that doesn't emphasize his origins: born in Algeria, immigrated as a small child, grew up in modest circumstances. The mother was a cleaning lady, the father a house painter. In France, people like to hear these stories. They prove that ascension is possible. In truth, they are so popular because they are rare and the symbolic walls are high. It takes winners like Mennour to overcome them.

Kamel Mennour owes everything to his mother, who raised their three children alone after the divorce. She instilled in him that with work you can achieve anything. After studying economics, he began selling lithographs, door to door, like a salesman. It was like an epiphany. He wanted to sell art, "never anything else". He would have loved to have brought coffee to the big galleries or swept the rooms “to be there, to learn”. But in the early 1990s, the milieu of the gallery owners was still hermetically sealed. During this time, his insatiable appetite for education begins: he reads everything he can find about art, he visits exhibitions, museums, galleries, absorbs knowledge, learns the language codes. "I was a nobody, I say that without any panache."

Does it bother him to be asked about his milieu to this day? no What bothers him is something else: that he is still being reduced to his origins. He wasn't even two when he came to Paris. "My name could also be Michel. Camel or Michel, what does it matter?” He wants to be judged for his work, not where he was born. He is French, not a model emigrant, not a “Zinédine Zidane of art”, as they initially called him. Mennour asks, would anyone in the US come up with the idea of ​​asking Larry Gagosian about his Armenian roots?

If you want to know how he chooses an artist, he compares it to love at first sight. The chemistry must be right. And then, when you work together, you have to tune into each other again and again, just like in a relationship. At Daniel Buren, he is proud of the many years he has been able to do this.

He got it into his head early on to bring the world-famous artist to his home. By coincidence, one day they were on the same plane from Paris to Seoul. He invited Buren to coffee. He left the business class, sat down with Mennour in the cheap seats and stayed for seven hours. It's now 14 years that the artist has been loyal to his gallerist - and he, the gallerist, to his artist. That's what it's all about, says Kamel Mennour this Sunday in the Petit Palais: trust.