I am a self-taught amateur artist, and this painting was born from a fascination I have had for many years with the small villages of southwestern France and northeastern Spain.

I have always been drawn to these places where houses are built so closely together that they seem to grow into one another, climbing hillsides and filling every available piece of land. Narrow streets, overlapping roofs and small passages create a dense, almost organic architecture, one that feels as though it has grown slowly over generations.

But what fascinates me most is the paradox. These villages can be physically dense yet humanly empty. The houses are packed tightly together, sometimes almost touching, while behind many of these walls there is increasingly no one left.

As people leave smaller villages for larger cities and megacities, the architecture remains while the human presence slowly disappears. The village becomes denser in its built form, but emptier in its life.

This is the idea at the heart of L'Héritier du dernier carré — The Heir of the Last Plot. That is why the houses in the painting leave almost no space between them. In some places, there is barely enough room for a single T-shirt to hang between two walls.

The T-shirt represents the last inhabitant; an invisible presence reduced to the last ordinary object they left behind. It becomes a quiet, almost absurd portrait of absence: one last sign of everyday life suspended between tightly packed buildings.

And this is where the title takes its meaning. L'Héritier du dernier carré — The Heir of the Last Plot is not about inheritance in the traditional sense. The heir is the last inhabitant of the village — the person who remains after everyone else has left. He is the heir of a disappearing way of life, surrounded by hundreds of houses that have remained standing while their inhabitants have slowly vanished.

The "last plot" is therefore not simply the last piece of land. It is the last inhabited space in a village that has become almost entirely architectural.

The painting asks a simple question: what does a village become when its houses remain, but its inhabitants disappear? A village can be full of houses and empty of people. A city can be full of people and empty of space. Between these two extremes lies the paradox that inspired this painting.

The auction will remain open until January 1, 2030. I wanted the work to remain suspended in time, allowing this paradox to exist beyond the usual lifespan of an artwork sale — and giving its last inhabitant, in a sense, a little more time before the story finally comes to an end.

And when the auction finally closes on January 1, 2030, the village will have one final question left to answer: who will become its last owner — the heir of the last inhabited square?