Although he began to learn the violin and was keen to become a musician, Paul Cox soon turned to painting, reassured about his choice by his meeting, as a teenager, with Pierre Alechinsky. A self-taught artist, Cox studied art history and English with a view to earning a living and becoming ‘a Sunday painter for whom every day would be a Sunday’, in the words of Dubuffet. After writing a thesis on Laurence Sterne and gaining a teaching qualification, he quickly stopped teaching, preferring to design children’s books, posters, illustrations for the press, logos, etc., as well as keeping up his painting. He also works for the stage, designing sets and costumes for L’Histoire du soldat (Opéra de Nancy, 1997) and The Nutcracker (Opéra de Genève, 2005). His recent series of modular maps revisited for one of his collections by Issey Miyake. Cox has begun the regular publication of his work in book form, with the first volume, Coxcodex I, being published by Le Seuil in 2004.