Alain is like those over-talented students, exhausting! Mature too soon, they plague our lives with their intelligent questions which torture us after we get home. You think you have answered them with the  confidence of your experience but you know that you don’t really know, that you answer out of habit, precisely without considering the question!

At first sight Alain’s work is stupid, like so many installations, videos or performances which adopt an air of stupidity to set up the challenge of forcing intelligence to emerge, by accident!

Since I am in a hurry, busy with a mass of things to do, the habit of ‘at first sight’ becomes the best one, gaining time, overcoming weariness, this supposed strategy is in often costly acts; a glance is pretty nearly enough to glance round a work which took very little more time than that to create. It’s a practical approach, tit for tat, it’s almost the perfect answer! Except that in an encounter with Alain, that’s where it gets stuck …

Final trap: a Citroën ‘Evasion’, tri-coloured like a police car, holds court in the Brétigny art centre.

So what do you think of it?

(I bring out my trump card) It falls (my good chap) between ‘ready-made’ (the height of unintended humour, the police really do have Citroën ‘Évasions’) and reheated Raymond Hains! Amusing, but worth another look!

A small silence develops, I glance round furtively, I wait for a little trembling of the lips, a vague concept, nothing!

Alain comes out from a publicity stand: formica-style table, Norwegian skaï chair, I am thrilled, for the first time I have just discovered a fault in Alain: he hides the ‘ready-made’ from me by dressing it up like a car show!

Then, a little shy and respectful, he takes the time to explain to me that I should take the time to understand that the stand is a rental stand! The gallery hires out police cars! You can go there for outings, sirens screaming at full pitch, hurtling through the streets at 90 miles an hour, going the wrong way down one-way streets, you are the king, the strongest, the best, the leader, you wipe the slate of your frustrations, and you live as you have always dreamed of living without daring to pay out what it takes to achieve it! A little silence, a little trembling of the lip, I go back home again on my poor little scooter, part of my poor little life. I know, more and more, that art has a purpose, when a patient seeker carves a jewel of mystification, the appearance of stupidity to conceal intelligence … Alain has screwed me, again …

Patrick Jeannes is an artist and a professor of Fine Arts in Paris.