Currently in progress: Colin, Nayirah, and This Person
Jean-Baptiste Maitre is currently developing a series of paintings that revisit the genre of history painting. His work captures televised moments he personally remembers, such as Colin Powell’s 2003 UN address and Nayirah al-Sabah’s 1990 testimony preceding the Gulf War. Maitre integrates them with Modernist language, such as stripe painting, and reflects on the paradox of portraiture in the time of synthetic images, and of the disapearance of privacy.
Colin, Nayirah and This Person
This project examines the media-driven erasure of Nayirah al-Sabah, whose 1990 false testimony before the US Congress served as a catalyst for the Gulf War. The artist contrasts this historical figure with the AI project thispersondoesnotexist.com to highlight a compelling paradox: while this AI generates faces of people who never existed, Nayirah represents a real person who exists only as a brief, televised fabrication.
Drawing on childhood memories as a schoolboy in the United States for whom the conflict was a distant, televised abstraction, the artist portrays Nayirah as a spectral entity. There are very few public information online about Nayirah today, as if her public life had stoped after the1990 televised Gulf war communication operation.
The work establishes a conceptual tension with the digital project thispersondoesnotexist.com to interrogate the nature of presence and disappearance in the digital age. While the thispersondoesnotexist algorithm generates the faces of fictional people destined to immediatly disapear after the webpage is closed, the artist offers a portrait of a real woman whose very existence seems to have dissolved the moment her political function was fulfilled. Nayirah is presented as a spectral entity—the "inverse effect" of artificial intelligence: a person whose public trace begins and ends abruptly with a single media event. She remains a paradox, visible only through her historical deception while remaining invisible in her human reality. By fixing her features, the artist captures this programmed disappearance, marking the point where the internet falls silent and the subject vanishes from the public sphere.
Français
Nayirah, et la femme qui n'existait pas
Dans ce projet, l'artiste explore la construction de l'image médiatique à travers la figure de Nayirah al-Sabah, célèbre pour son faux témoignage devant le Congrès américain en 1990 qui précipita l'entrée en guerre des États-Unis. Ce travail prend racine dans un souvenir d’enfance : celui de l'ariste, alors écolier dans le Kentucky pour qui le conflit n’était qu'une abstraction diffusée sur les écrans, illustrée par des dessins de classe aux slogans simplistes (« Saddam is a loser ») et par le visage de cette jeune fille au discours alors insaisissable.
L'œuvre établit une tension conceptuelle avec le projet numérique thispersondoesnotexist.com afin d'interroger la persistance de l'existence à l'ère de l'image. Si l'algorithme de thispersondoesnotexist génère le visage de personnes fictives vouées à ne jamais exister, l'artiste propose ici le portrait d'une femme réelle dont l'existence même semble s'être dissoute sitôt sa fonction politique accomplie: en effet l'existence publique de Nayirah Al Sabbah est inexistente sur les reseaux.
Nayirah y est présentée comme une entité spectrale, un "effet inverse" de l'intelligence artificielle : une personne dont la trace publique commence et s'arrête net lors d'un événement médiatique, faisant d'elle un être paradoxalement visible par son mensonge, mais invisible dans sa réalité humaine. En fixant ses traits, l'artiste tente de saisir cette disparition programmée, là où l'archive se tait et où le sujet s'efface de la sphère publique.
This Person Does Not Exist, 40 x 50 cm, Oil On linen, 2025
The image is based on a face generated by the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com — meaning the person depicted has never existed and will never appear again. The painting becomes the only physical trace of a non-existent individual, a kind of portrait without a subject.
I’m interested in how painting, which historically anchors memory and identity, can now also give presence to someone who has no history, no biography, no life. It shifts the role of portraiture from representing a real person to calling someone into being. The uniqueness lies not in likeness, but in the act of giving them a body through paint.
Colin Powell with Red Stripes (2025) Oil on linen, 100 x 150 cm
The artist utilizes the stripe painting tradition of Post-Painterly Abstraction to recontextualize this political moment, using the pattern to signal a departure from documentary reality.
" With this project, I am returning to a Self-Reflexive Painting, a painting where the work doesn't just show you a story, but points at how you are seeing that story. By inserting the Modernist stripe into a History painting, I want to suggest a separation between the story and the paint."
Modernist painting from the 1950s to the 1980s was defined by a critical reflection on the medium itself, a practice that has largely vanished in favor of narrative-driven figurative painting that mirrors the passive consumption of social media. This project utilizes the Modernist stripe as a tool of critique. By applying this visual vocabulary to recent historical events, the artist intent to use stripes not in a decorative manner but to challenge the image-as-opinion, hinting at the construction of the history being presented, rather than simply looking through it, close to the modernist insistence that painting should make viewers aware of its own conditions rather than simply absorb narrative content.
You could think of the stripe in this project as doing three jobs at once: it interrupts narrative immersion, exposes the painting as an artifact, and echoes the way public history is assembled from framed, repeated, and circulated images. That makes the work feel close to a critique of both modern painting and contemporary media culture. The painting does not just show history; it stages the conditions under which history becomes visible.
This also gives the work a tension between emotion and skepticism. History painting traditionally invites identification, while modernist stripe painting resists that by emphasizing surface, repetition, and form. Maitre seems to combine those two impulses so that the viewer is drawn into the event but repeatedly reminded that the event is mediated, edited, and ideologically shaped.
The stripe can expose how history is framed. In that sense, the stripe becomes a way to say: this is not transparent history, but constructed visibility.
One especially productive reading is that the stripe acts like a visual equivalent of quotation marks: it signals that the scene is both present and withheld, both image and commentary.
Currently in progress: Colin, Nayirah, and This Person
Jean-Baptiste Maitre is currently developing a series of paintings that revisit the genre of history painting. His work captures televised moments he personally remembers, such as Colin Powell’s 2003 UN address and Nayirah al-Sabah’s 1990 testimony preceding the Gulf War. Maitre integrates them with Modernist language, such as stripe painting, and reflects on the paradox of portraiture in the time of synthetic images, and of the disapearance of privacy.
Colin, Nayirah and This Person
This project examines the media-driven erasure of Nayirah al-Sabah, whose 1990 false testimony before the US Congress served as a catalyst for the Gulf War. The artist contrasts this historical figure with the AI project thispersondoesnotexist.com to highlight a compelling paradox: while this AI generates faces of people who never existed, Nayirah represents a real person who exists only as a brief, televised fabrication.
Drawing on childhood memories as a schoolboy in the United States for whom the conflict was a distant, televised abstraction, the artist portrays Nayirah as a spectral entity. There are very few public information online about Nayirah today, as if her public life had stoped after the1990 televised Gulf war communication operation.
The work establishes a conceptual tension with the digital project thispersondoesnotexist.com to interrogate the nature of presence and disappearance in the digital age. While the thispersondoesnotexist algorithm generates the faces of fictional people destined to immediatly disapear after the webpage is closed, the artist offers a portrait of a real woman whose very existence seems to have dissolved the moment her political function was fulfilled. Nayirah is presented as a spectral entity—the "inverse effect" of artificial intelligence: a person whose public trace begins and ends abruptly with a single media event. She remains a paradox, visible only through her historical deception while remaining invisible in her human reality. By fixing her features, the artist captures this programmed disappearance, marking the point where the internet falls silent and the subject vanishes from the public sphere.
Français
Nayirah, et la femme qui n'existait pas
Dans ce projet, l'artiste explore la construction de l'image médiatique à travers la figure de Nayirah al-Sabah, célèbre pour son faux témoignage devant le Congrès américain en 1990 qui précipita l'entrée en guerre des États-Unis. Ce travail prend racine dans un souvenir d’enfance : celui de l'ariste, alors écolier dans le Kentucky pour qui le conflit n’était qu'une abstraction diffusée sur les écrans, illustrée par des dessins de classe aux slogans simplistes (« Saddam is a loser ») et par le visage de cette jeune fille au discours alors insaisissable.
L'œuvre établit une tension conceptuelle avec le projet numérique thispersondoesnotexist.com afin d'interroger la persistance de l'existence à l'ère de l'image. Si l'algorithme de thispersondoesnotexist génère le visage de personnes fictives vouées à ne jamais exister, l'artiste propose ici le portrait d'une femme réelle dont l'existence même semble s'être dissoute sitôt sa fonction politique accomplie: en effet l'existence publique de Nayirah Al Sabbah est inexistente sur les reseaux.
Nayirah y est présentée comme une entité spectrale, un "effet inverse" de l'intelligence artificielle : une personne dont la trace publique commence et s'arrête net lors d'un événement médiatique, faisant d'elle un être paradoxalement visible par son mensonge, mais invisible dans sa réalité humaine. En fixant ses traits, l'artiste tente de saisir cette disparition programmée, là où l'archive se tait et où le sujet s'efface de la sphère publique.
This Person Does Not Exist, 40 x 50 cm, Oil On linen, 2025
The image is based on a face generated by the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com — meaning the person depicted has never existed and will never appear again. The painting becomes the only physical trace of a non-existent individual, a kind of portrait without a subject.
I’m interested in how painting, which historically anchors memory and identity, can now also give presence to someone who has no history, no biography, no life. It shifts the role of portraiture from representing a real person to calling someone into being. The uniqueness lies not in likeness, but in the act of giving them a body through paint.
Colin Powell with Red Stripes (2025) Oil on linen, 100 x 150 cm
The artist utilizes the stripe painting tradition of Post-Painterly Abstraction to recontextualize this political moment, using the pattern to signal a departure from documentary reality.
" With this project, I am returning to a Self-Reflexive Painting, a painting where the work doesn't just show you a story, but points at how you are seeing that story. By inserting the Modernist stripe into a History painting, I want to suggest a separation between the story and the paint."
Modernist painting from the 1950s to the 1980s was defined by a critical reflection on the medium itself, a practice that has largely vanished in favor of narrative-driven figurative painting that mirrors the passive consumption of social media. This project utilizes the Modernist stripe as a tool of critique. By applying this visual vocabulary to recent historical events, the artist intent to use stripes not in a decorative manner but to challenge the image-as-opinion, hinting at the construction of the history being presented, rather than simply looking through it, close to the modernist insistence that painting should make viewers aware of its own conditions rather than simply absorb narrative content.
You could think of the stripe in this project as doing three jobs at once: it interrupts narrative immersion, exposes the painting as an artifact, and echoes the way public history is assembled from framed, repeated, and circulated images. That makes the work feel close to a critique of both modern painting and contemporary media culture. The painting does not just show history; it stages the conditions under which history becomes visible.
This also gives the work a tension between emotion and skepticism. History painting traditionally invites identification, while modernist stripe painting resists that by emphasizing surface, repetition, and form. Maitre seems to combine those two impulses so that the viewer is drawn into the event but repeatedly reminded that the event is mediated, edited, and ideologically shaped.
The stripe can expose how history is framed. In that sense, the stripe becomes a way to say: this is not transparent history, but constructed visibility.
One especially productive reading is that the stripe acts like a visual equivalent of quotation marks: it signals that the scene is both present and withheld, both image and commentary.