My Dinky Toy turns over on the ground, I give my description of it out loud, I cry out in my horror at the little plastic pilot who has just ejected, who lies, pitiful, on the lawn, I can see the watchers, the emergency help, vehicles dashing from all sides, in an urgent slalom through the flames, extinguishers … I am hallucinating, I am a child, I am inventing what I see. My pistols are real, dolls are babies, I am the king in my cardboard crown, Zorro with a nylon cape…

Alain is also hallucinating, he’s a playmate, a reporter in Budapest on Bastille Day tanks, a KGB agent via an advertising agency, Jesus walking on the water, hanged by erection, Commissioner Broussard on a fake Mesrine … Young Alain replays the scene, as expert he piles up the details in order to believe in it and to ‘make us believe’.

Young Alain plays the artist, a grown-up game for child’s play: ‘you could say that I will be a reporter, a spy, a Jesus, a scientist, a superman, a bandit, a journalist’.

Young Alain, the expert, imagines minor objects which ‘make him believe’.

The artist Alain, the expert, offers us the proofs of his lie, uncovers his little tricks, changing locations, dates, circumstances.

Alain the artist, the expert, feels that for him art is nothing more than a make-do for what is real, the extraordinary replaces the routine, our routine.

The artist has no cardboard crown, he has only his will to live to the highest pitch, to the greatest height of himself, seeking out friends to play with him: ‘we will kidnap someone, we will screw the girls, spy on the cops, kill someone or kill ourselves’. You go with him, you play with him, victim or guilty, monk or whore, slave or master, Indian or cowboy, a wretch or a genius, father or lover; Alain is a child, Alain is an artist, an expert, he intends to play with our uniqueness that we thought was indivisible.

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