When this painting was made in 1997 I was a child and very fond of mainstream cartoon characters, which I would occasionally try to draw myself, very much unsuccessfully. I do remember having a very strong bond with those figures, considering them as being my friends from a different world, hence my attempt to incorporate them to my own world by trying to portrait them. I guess most kids feel that way about them and so when I saw this painting on canvas and wood at Pompidou in Paris, I immediately stopped to look twice. Jim Dine’s pop imagery was vibrating with nostalgia, very personal and intimate but also all-embracing as addressed to most people’s early years of life. Pinocchio and Mickey Mouse surrounded a Crow, a Skeleton and the Grim Reaper; the 5 oxymora figures, autonomous but poetically interconnected, seemed to have a distorted agency, reflecting on the ordinary as a notion, colourful and bleak, a binary representation of child psyche and the inevitable. Ape, Police, Doctor, Soldier, Me depicted a congeries of memories, fears and innocence on a subconscious level; it talked to me about the future with a voice coming from the past. I noticed Pinocchio, a dominant motif in Dine’s artwork, being the only one looking away; prone to lying, it made sense for him to be the one misleading himself and the audience from what being human entangles! I wonder how I would have reacted to this painting if I had come across it back in 1997… I would have probably been scared wondering what my friends are doing next to those ominous shapes that looked like they dwell on my worst nightmares! I walked away thinking that Pinocchio and Mickey on the two sides of the painting must symbolise an exuberant circle of recurring youth-like purity and simplicity; a perpetuate, never-ending interchange of carelessness and maturity. Or maybe it was just me wanting/needing to perceive that way an artwork that is definitely open to a plethora of interpretations…