The Magic Vase

The Magic Vase, and the hole where it falls.

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).

At Gallery Martin van Zomeren, 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.

The body of work constitute the attempt of the artist to create a different cinema as a tool to meditate on early XXth century public 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. The paintings are scanned in hundreds of sections of the size of a film frame (35mm). All sections are ordered one after another through an editing software in order to produce the video 'The Magic Vase'.

The imagery he uses is inspired by a 1919 work made by Hannah Hoch, where the fragmentation of the Weimar republic is reconstructed through collage.

Abstract patterns are created through chance based brushstrokes compositions as well as patterns inspired by industrial gear wheels (Chevron Patterns) and the representation of circles in buddhist culture.

Jean-Baptiste Maitre (1978, France), works in Paris and Amsterdam. Recent shows includes ‘It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it’, Manifesta Foundation, Amsterdam; CODEX, Wattis Institute for contemporary Arts, San Francisco; ’Stripe Paintings’, La Salle De Bain art center, Lyon; ‘This is what I meant’, P/////AKT, Amsterdam; and ‘Post-Sculpture’ with bruce McClean, Galerie 1m3, Lausanne.