Crossing language's invisible frontier

The inside of John Lalor and Janet Ryan's apartment in Montmartre feels like an Irish cottage, with its painted board floor, blue and green walls and rough wooden table where a Bewley's coffee mug sits amid jam jars, tangerines and croissants. A naked light bulb burns over the kitchen sink, next to the hot water boiler.

But the radio is tuned to France-Inter, and old copies of Liberation are scattered around the front room. John and Janet long ago crossed the invisible frontier between the English and French-speaking worlds.

Together, as an adventure.

Their only connection with the Irish community in Paris is the Embassy's annual St Patrick's Day reception. They still feel Irish, but they have no plans to go back.

The couple met in 1986, when John was a 25-year-old student at the Limerick School of Art and Design and Janet, then 19, made circuit boards in an electronics factory. Nothing indicated they would end up as a promising painter and an advertising executive in Paris. John grew up in Dun Laoghaire, where his father was an accountant and his mother ran a guest house. Janet's nine brothers and sisters have all stayed in Limerick, where her father is a garage manager.

The telephone keeps ringing. Most of the calls are from Ireland - friends and relatives wishing John luck on his big day. That afternoon, his first solo exhibition was to open in the Marais, which has replaced the Left Bank as the centre of the French art world. A joint show last year with three other painters was a turning point, John says. "It's a matter of getting known and seen, getting written about. There's a business aspect that I don't really like. I'm nervous about today."

In 1988, John and Janet hitchhiked to Provence, where they stayed for a year before returning briefly to Dublin, penniless and heartbroken at having left France. They made their way back to Paris. In 1990, John sold 10 paintings in London - enough to finance Janet's first year of French graphic arts school. They determined to speak only French, except with each other. "We decided to drop a lot of people. Just get rid of them," Janet says. "They had befriended us as English speakers and they couldn't handle these two spluttering Irish people."

Now, most of John's friends are French painters. Every Tuesday morning, 10 of them meet at the Cafe Coste across from the Pompidou Centre to discuss painting. There is no "school", no style that is recognisably late 20th century, John explains.

"Figurative painting today is classed as reactionary. At the Whitney Museum in New York, it's all videos, performance, installations. People have been saying for the past 10 years that painting is dead. Contemporary art is fragmented. That's why we have these meetings every Tuesday. We're saying: `This is what Cezanne has done to us, and we accept it.' "

It would be easy - and unfair - to portray John and Janet as the cliched young couple leading the Bohemian life in Montmartre, sleeping on the sofa bed so he can keep one room for his painting. John's resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh adds to the temptation. "No stereotypes," he growls when I suggest we photograph him and Janet in front of his easel. "No easel. No baguettes either."

Janet is the relaxed and friendly foil to John's tortured artist. She is small and bubbly with short, spiky gold and copper streaked hair and she works as an art director at the French subsidiary of McCann Erickson, the US advertising giant. "I always go in with a positive attitude and they love that, the way I say: `We have a solution here baby.' " She is in raptures over her new television spot for Crunch cereal. "A-mazing", she calls it.

That afternoon, in the Rue Vieille du Temple, the gallery owner Robert Carrat tells me that he wanted to exhibit John's paintings "because he is young and because he uses new techniques". These include painting on carpet and the patterned, protective padding the French call bulgomme, making boxes out of paintings with layers of glass - often itself painted - altering the underlying image.

The artist asks what I think. I admire the skill in the portraits and landscapes, I tell him. But I'm still making up my mind about the boxes and glass and bulgomme. Did he ever consider doing plain old traditional paintings? John Lalor smiles, for he is accustomed to Philistine questions. Art is about experimentation, about new ideas, about adventure, he tells me. Artists are only remembered for what they did differently from those before them. "There is no point me painting the 19th century all over again."