" 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.

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.