Jean-Baptiste Maitre

The Telephone is Killing the Cosmos
Le Téléphone Tue Le Cosmos

Series of 21 paintings, Modeling paste, acrylic, ink, varnish on Resin Coated Paper, mounted on canvas, 30 x 40 cm or 40 x 60 cm, 2018-2019.

"The Telephone is Killing the Cosmos” is a series of paintings depicting still lifes (flowers, fruits, dead animals), scenes of human struggles, telephones and cultural artefacts. The paintings are first made colorless, white acrylic on a white canvas, then scanned and colors printed over to render machine vision visible over human trace.

Exhibitions at Gallery Martin van Zomeren, 2018; Rita Urso Artopia Gallery, Milan, 2018; Art Dusseldorf 2019; California Museum of Photography, 2021

Text from the solo exhibition at Rita Urso Artopia Gallery, Milan, 2018:

The french artist Jean-Baptiste Maitre is exhibiting new visual experiments that focus on figurative representation. On the first floor of the gallery, portrayed subjects such as still-lives, battle scenes, landscapes and cinema posters are created through a particular technique invented by Maitre. Images are subjected to a great deal of transformations making their visual recognition hostile to the observer’s eye.

As a first step in Maitre’s technique, a layer of white acrylic paint is applied onto a resin coated paper. It is then modeled through quick and clear brushstrokes which create the base of the painting. At this stage, guidelines are set, and shapes are outlined. In the second phase, the visual structure that has been created on paper is digitally scanned, in a similar way that the radiography of a drawing would identify the skeleton of an image. Finally, using an image editing software, colors are directly printed onto the identified structure with a modified inkjet printer. The result is a visually contrasted painting that combines a fast hand-painted image with a precise digital color print. The blurred effect that comes from this overlay alters the perception of the human-eye. In Maitre’s work, man and machine are overlapped, creating a dialogue between the topics of precision and intentions. The machine’s precision and its automatic mechanics act upon something that is uncontrollable and imprecise: human intention.

The exhibited works show the artist’s thoughts on pictorial gesture made by machines –tools without a soul– rather than by living beings. This idea generates still lives that one could qualify as post-human.

Text from the exhibition: "Art in the Plague year" at California Museum of Photography, 2021.

Jean-Baptiste Maitre titles his project after a 1923 quote by German cultural theorist Aby Warburg: “The telephone kills the cosmos.” Conversation technology, Warburg suggests, means men can talk at a distance without the need to walk to one another. And by not walking the world, man does not encounter the natural world and therefore does not create poetic, mythic interpretations of nature.

Maitre made a colorless painting—white acrylic on a white canvas. A modest size: 30 x 40 cm [11.8 x 15.75 inches]. It was, he says, a traditional still life symbolically engaged with issues of life and mortality: dead birds and hares, fruit, a tree branch. Maitre then scanned the white-on white work and used text recognition software “to identify an image in the painting.” This end-point piece is the image produced by the software. It encapsulates mortality, transformation, drift, and mutation in the time of plague.
Video of the painting process: https://youtu.be/iw84BspI_oI?si=RlXJmIpkPzwnOOkM

Video of the painting process: https://youtu.be/iw84BspI_oI?si=RlXJmIpkPzwnOOkM