During his entire life Jean-Daniel Allanche continued to paint and repaint the apartment in which he lived in Paris: its walls, floors and ceilings. Apart from his paintings there was a vast accumulation of objects, thousands of them collected and transformed, memories of travel and living spaces, piled up under the stairs and in the corners of the apartment. His creation is also a utopian project; while many creators of art brut aim to control time, space, or the world, Jean-Daniel Allanche, physics teacher and researcher, devised a means to calculate the risk in casino games. In notebooks and on hundreds of sheets he developed series of number combinations of various colours, annotations and also comments about the behavior of players or croupiers who, he believed, can influence the result of the game. He thus spent a large part of his life going from one casino to another trying to establish a never-fail betting system. His passion for the game accompanied him to his last days when, hospitalized, he continued to play with numbers from his multiple examinations and to predict what would happen. Jean-Daniel Allanche did not find the magic formula, but his consuming passion leaves us a production of thousands of drawings as beautiful as they are enigmatic, testifying to a mad quest to conjure luck.
ALLANCHE jean-daniel
