[Again, no page numbers. I’m taking Page 1 as the introduction by Jean-Christophe Menu, so the first page of art is page 5]

_Twelve Years of Reworking the Canvas_
The Goblette told me everything about that exalted day: the boozy reunion with ‘the Fireman’, the Magic that Nikita already had, Bleeding, the trunk “from when I brought back all the stuff from when I was with the pirates”, and which in the process totally disintegrated, turbo injection…Roger Out! When I say everything, I mean everything. It was the perfect moment for starting with the essential Autobiography, and through it, to arrive, of course, at the Attic.
It was back in 1995. The first pages of the first chapter were as striking as they were smelly. Each time I saw them, the oil had done something new to the paintings. This worried me a bit because I could see, clear as day, that Black and White would never be enough to capture such nuances.
Circumstances dictated that this Autobiography was often put on hiatus. There were other books, exhibitions, travels abroad…The Autobiography came back, went away, came back once more. The style changed, the grey graphite of a pencil would now capture and hold Brussels and Charleroi in place, but it was the same story as the pages from 1995, which had meanwhile continued to yellow. Bringing this sepia tone and their now discarded style into the present was a way for Dom to defy the passage of time, the real raw material of this book, completed twelve years after it was begun.
This book smells of oils, pastels, freshly cut wood, the canopies of the Old Market; it’s the exhalation after twelve years of energetic attempts to solve various problems, each now carefully worked out and laid to rest in their separate compartments. “Pretending is the Same as Lying” breathes like no other book.

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Chapter 1