SLENSKE: Where did you find the lichen?

MORELLET: On rocks outside my house in New Jersey. Then I drew right on a print and then drew others on Mylar over the prints and framed the Mylar in a white background. (IMAGE: FLORENT MORELLET; LICHENSTEIN #3)

SLENSKE: These are almost deconstructed versions of nature. It looks topographical at first.

MORELLET: Yeah, and with maps it's almost what you want to look at. You can layer it or take some layers out.

SLENSKE: So how did you get involved with this project?

MORELLET: Katharine decided to do the book and when she approached mapmakers she learned about more mapmakers and one of the artists in the show told her about me.

SLENSKE: Had you ever been published before?

MORELLET: Well, I've had exhibitions since I was 20 years old in New York, Paris. You see, I don't like very much the art world because I was born and raised in it. My father, Francois Morellet, is one of the most famous French artists.

SLENSKE: So it was daunting to come up in his shadow?

MORELLET: It's not daunting, I just don't like it. I mean, I do it for my father but galleries wanted to take him because his work was controversial here. He was an abstract minimalist and his work predates Sol Lewitt and Frank Stella and it just disturbed the order of things. He had a museum retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 1985 and it was completely ignored. He has pieces in the MoMA, but there was a show at the MoMA ten years ago with nothing of his in the show but they had pieces of his all over the walls upstairs. So I'm fine doing it for him, but I don't like Chelsea, I don't like SoHo, what it was. But I like this guy Christopher Henry. I met him through someone who was working at the Lichtenstein Foundation and I've been in a dozen shows and every time people have approached me. Many times in Europe they learn about my work through my parents. I was doing maps since I was 10 years old, and when my parents found out they said, "Oh, you are an artist." I was like, "No." And they said, "No, you are an artist." And because of that I continued doing art. When most parents would say, "Stop doing this, do your homework," my parents kept pushing me. When I finished high school at 18 my parents said, "How about studying urban planning?" Which I did. I dropped out but I got even more passionate about cities and I create my own cities as you can see. Also, I intervene with maps and go crazy.

SLENSKE: All the pieces you're doing now new?

MORELLET: Yes. I did some new lichens, because I thought, "Let's expand." I also took pictures of the beach at low tide in Cape Cod and it looks like Jurassic mountains ridges, like the Appalachians or the Girard Mountains in France or a little bit like the desert in the Sahara. I also did a series of "Lichensteins." And the reason for that is that when Roy Lichtenstein died–he and his wife and his assistant came to lunch every weekday for a decade at the restaurant. They worked five blocks away and it was their cantina, so when he died I decided to blow up a Michelin map of Liechtenstein and frame it and put it right across from where he sat on the wall. It was a very discreet memorial to Roy and people in the know knew about it and eventually it became part of Restaurant Florent's lore. But before closing the restaurant last year I did an auction on eBay of the real maps on the walls of the restaurant and the money was raised for my staff as a parting bonus for them and we raised $55,000 but a big chunk of that was from Dorothy Lichtenstein, Roy's widow. She said she wanted to buy that piece and when I told her where the money was going she bought it for $25,000.

SLENSKE: And you didn't make that map?

MORELLET: No, it was just a blown up map in a frame. So I decided right away that I would do a piece for her as a gift. It became a piece that took days and when I finished I decided to do a second one for myself and then I decided I'll do a series. By that time the show was decided and so there are four Liechtensteins and three, what I call, Lichensteins and Dorothy is coming early and she will choose which one she wants.

SLENSKE: So why maps?

MORELLET: It's cities, especially. There's something fantastic about cities. They outlive us. We die but they are organic and they live forever. They're a little bit like coral reefs–they extend and they shrink. When you look at Rome, how fantastic it is that it had a million and a half people during the height of the Roman empire then it went down to 15,000 people, a lot of them living inside the Colosseum, which was a quarry. In the suburbs it now has 4 million people. When you look the city goes up the hills and around the valleys and it looks like an organic life. The smaller streets feed into the bigger arteries and you talk about the heart of the city and and the arteries feed into the heart. You can make them look, with maps, like life. And they are.

I can tell you by looking at a map where the rich are, where the poor are, where the wind comes from. It just says so much about the people.

SLENSKE: That's pretty fascinating.

MORELLET: Years ago before I'd ever been to Tokyo I was talking to a Japanese woman on a plane flight and I was talking to her about Tokyo and she said, "How many times have you been to Tokyo?" And I said, "Never." She was baffled. I fall asleep looking at maps of cities.

SLENSKE: So is mapmaking your new thing? You talked about maybe going back to do another restaurant.

MORELLET: I've been in talks with people about doing a restaurant and you know what, I came to realize I didn't want to do a restaurant at the moment. Maybe I will change my mind, but I've been in restaurants for 35 years and I've done it. I'd like to do something different. At the moment I'd really like to do a hotel. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else, I don't know. We'll see.

The Map as Art opens tonight through January 10 at Christopher Henry Gallery, 127 Elizabeth Street, NYC; The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography available today through Princeton Architectural Press.