Tabuba has been inspired by numerous travellings and hereby a few of my drawings in my Tabuba notebook.

I love to mix working notes with quick drawings made on the table of a restaurant, during a meeting, just to catch the magic instant of the moment. Tabuba adventure has brought me from Santo Domingo, through Brazil, Fez, London and numerous other cities and countries.
Tabuba story is a story over the five continents. New-York is a city that has inspired me a lot  by the energy provided there, but I also decided of some of the colours to be applied on the Tabuba shoes in the north-east coast of Brazil, in Morroco as well as the Caribbean Isle of Dominican Republic.

I dreamed about a shoe where Art is the main topic. Something you are proud to wear. A shoe expressing the diversity of the world and the people. In fact the initial story of Tabuba began in Dominican Republic in Santo Domingo. A friend of mine was restauring a colonial building with old stoned towers, and there was a huge old wall in stone. He asked me if I could paint a 15 m² picture relating about the story of Dominican Republic. I said yes ! And this was a challenge to paint such a huge surface, the name of the painting is “Taïnica” in reference of Picasso’s Guernica. The painting shows the genocide of the Taïnos Indians by the spanish soldiers. Haitian people came every day to watch me painting what they called the “biggest painting” never made in Dominican Republic….. What a pressure  I had !   

While painting “Taïnica” I was wearing a pair of moroccon Babouches type of shoes. One day, while I was paining my huge picture, I began to continue the painting on my shoes, making laugh all my haitians friends watching me… this was the real birth of Tabuba ! I ended the painting after one month and left Santo Domingo to come to Paris. The first collections of Tabuba were drown in the north east coast of Brazil, in a beautiful House, on the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Macaio and Salvador de Bahia. Then the Tabuba Story became a story of amazing meetings with marvellous people who switched into the Tabuba project, from Dominique Billard, the amazing Silkscreen artist, Marc Jakobiec, my artistic director, Carl, the street artist creating all the Urban Tribe Collection, Hamid and Ahmed from Fez, etc…