Jean-Baptiste Maitre

2014

The Magic Vase / Mandala République

“The Magic Vase / Mandala republique” - Two animation videos made by creating and scanning large paintings containing all the film frames. The first video explores the looting of the Iraq Museum of Baghdad on april 9th 2003. The second video is a retake on Hannah Hoch 1919 visual description of the Weimar Republic and its collapse.

The Magic Vase, HD video, 7', silent

MANDALA République, HD video, 4', silent

Mandala République

JEAN-BAPTISTE MAITRE
MANDALA RÉPUBLIQUE / THE MAGIC VASE
11 October - 15 November 2014

The images you are seeing on television
you are seeing
over and over and over
and it’s the same picture
of some person
walking out of some building
with a vase
and you see it twenty times
and you think:
my goodness, were there that many vases?

(U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Press Briefing at the Pentagon, USA, April 11th 2003)
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Maitre has displayed a body of works comprising a set of paintings on paper, on rope, and cotton, using various techniques such as acrylic and spray paint, inkjet print, batik, dye and collages. Two videos were made by scanning the displayed paintings and arranging sections of them into an editing software. additionally, sculptures of ceramics mimicking neon signage writes keywords of the two videos: "20 men with 20 vases", and " Mandala République".

The video " The Magic Vase" is the attempt of the artist to create a different cinema as a tool to meditate on early XX1st century events, such as the looting of the Iraq Museum of Baghdad on april 9th 2003.

Maitre’s meditative cinema techniques is inspired by 1960s film maker Paul Sharit’s logic of frozen film frames, and 1940s film maker Len Lye’s aesthetic.

In the second video " Mandala Republique", the imagery he uses is a retake on a 1919 work made by Hannah Hoch (" Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany" , where the fragmentation of the Weimar republic is reconstructed through sections of paintings he made specifically to produce the video film frames.

in the paintings one can see sequences of dancing, industrial cog-wheels, and other figurative elements, as well as abstract patterns created through chance based compositions made with ropes and brushstrokes as well as patterns inspired by industrial chevron Patterns and the representation of circles.

IDFA 2015
International Documentary Film Amsterdam 2015 - EYE film Museum- Amsterdam
Catalogue

on "Shaped Cinema" , and "The Magic Vase" by Jean-Baptiste Maitre

Jean-Baptiste Maitre describes his artistic practice as “filmmaking without a camera.” This approach yields an utterly personal cinema that sometimes takes the form of sculptures or paintings. Maitre makes his artworks using the digital film techniques that he mastered during his previous career in the advertising industry. But he also produces moving images. One example is Shaped Cinema (2010), for which he printed the pages of a museum catalogue on the artist Frank Stella directly onto 35mm film, causing the images to vibrate restlessly. Although Maitre makes frequent reference to the minimalist idiom of the 1970s, his work also betrays the influence of experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. His concealing of a political message beneath a layer of absurdism suggests he is also inspired by the interwar Dadaist art movement. In The Magic Vase (2014), he focuses on the sloppy handling of Iraqi cultural heritage after the fall of Saddam Hussein, endlessly repeating news footage of art thieves to underline the almost inconceivable enormity of the crime. might best be viewed as a bitterly poetic sequel in which abstract Islamic motifs dance like deranged whirling dervishes.