that give such a magical glow to the forests of California pine descending toward the sea in
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology
, are borrowed from the Rembrandt range of oils by the firm Royal Talens. And for the whites he almost always used Old Holland oils, whose opacity he appreciated.
Jed Martin’s first paintings, art historians have later emphasized, could easily lead you down the wrong track. By devoting his first two canvases—
Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher
, then
Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager
—to professions in decline, Martin could give the impression of nostalgia for a past age, real or fantasized, in France. Nothing, and this is the conclusion that has ended up emerging about all his works, was more foreign to his real preoccupations; and if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their probable disappearance: it was simply that they were indeed going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas while there was still time. For his third painting in the series of professions,
Maya Dubois, Remote Maintenance
Assistant
, he devoted himself to a profession that was in no way stricken or
old-fashioned
, a profession on the contrary emblematic of the policy of
just-in-time production
which had oriented the entire economic redeployment of Western Europe at the turn of the third millennium.
In the first monograph he devoted to Martin, Wong Fu Xin develops a curious analogy based on colorimetry. The colors of the objects in the world can be represented by a certain number of primary colors; the minimum number, to achieve an almost realistic representation, is three. But you can perfectly build a colorimetric chart on the basis of four, five, six, or even more primary colors; the spectrum of representation would in this way become more extensive and subtle.
In the same way, asserts the Chinese essayist, the productive conditions of a given society may be re-created by means of a number of typical professions, whose number, according to him (it is a figure he gives without any empirical evidence), can be fixed at between ten and twenty. In the numerically most important part of the Professions series, the one that art historians have taken the habit of entitling the Series of Simple Professions, Jed Martin portrays no fewer than forty-two typical professions, thus offering, for the study of the productive conditions of the society of his times, a spectrum of analysis that is particularly extensive and rich. The following twenty-two paintings, centered on confrontations and encounters, classically called the Series of Business Compositions, themselves aimed to give a relational and dialectical image of the functioning of the economy as a whole.
The Series of Simple Professions took Jed Martin a little more than seven years to paint. During these years, he didn’t meet many people, and formed no new relationship—whether sentimental or simply friendly. He had moments of sensory pleasure: an orgy of Italian pasta after a raid on the Casino supermarket in the boulevard Vincent-Auriol; such-and-such an evening with a Lebanese escort whose sexual performances amply justified the ecstatic reviews she received on the site Niamodel.com. “Layla, I love you, you are the sunshine of my days in the office, my little oriental star,” wrote some unfortunate fiftysomethings, while Layla for her part dreamed of muscular men, virile, poor, and strong: this was the life, basically, as she saw it. Easily identified as a guy whowas “a bit bizarre but nice, not at all dangerous,” Jed benefited with Layla from that kind of
exception of extra-territoriality
that has always been attributed to artists by the
girls
. It is maybe Layla, but more certainly Geneviève, his Malagasy ex-girlfriend, who is recalled in one of his most touching canvases,
Aimée, Escort Girl
, treated with an
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology
, are borrowed from the Rembrandt range of oils by the firm Royal Talens. And for the whites he almost always used Old Holland oils, whose opacity he appreciated.
Jed Martin’s first paintings, art historians have later emphasized, could easily lead you down the wrong track. By devoting his first two canvases—
Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher
, then
Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager
—to professions in decline, Martin could give the impression of nostalgia for a past age, real or fantasized, in France. Nothing, and this is the conclusion that has ended up emerging about all his works, was more foreign to his real preoccupations; and if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their probable disappearance: it was simply that they were indeed going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas while there was still time. For his third painting in the series of professions,
Maya Dubois, Remote Maintenance
Assistant
, he devoted himself to a profession that was in no way stricken or
old-fashioned
, a profession on the contrary emblematic of the policy of
just-in-time production
which had oriented the entire economic redeployment of Western Europe at the turn of the third millennium.
In the first monograph he devoted to Martin, Wong Fu Xin develops a curious analogy based on colorimetry. The colors of the objects in the world can be represented by a certain number of primary colors; the minimum number, to achieve an almost realistic representation, is three. But you can perfectly build a colorimetric chart on the basis of four, five, six, or even more primary colors; the spectrum of representation would in this way become more extensive and subtle.
In the same way, asserts the Chinese essayist, the productive conditions of a given society may be re-created by means of a number of typical professions, whose number, according to him (it is a figure he gives without any empirical evidence), can be fixed at between ten and twenty. In the numerically most important part of the Professions series, the one that art historians have taken the habit of entitling the Series of Simple Professions, Jed Martin portrays no fewer than forty-two typical professions, thus offering, for the study of the productive conditions of the society of his times, a spectrum of analysis that is particularly extensive and rich. The following twenty-two paintings, centered on confrontations and encounters, classically called the Series of Business Compositions, themselves aimed to give a relational and dialectical image of the functioning of the economy as a whole.
The Series of Simple Professions took Jed Martin a little more than seven years to paint. During these years, he didn’t meet many people, and formed no new relationship—whether sentimental or simply friendly. He had moments of sensory pleasure: an orgy of Italian pasta after a raid on the Casino supermarket in the boulevard Vincent-Auriol; such-and-such an evening with a Lebanese escort whose sexual performances amply justified the ecstatic reviews she received on the site Niamodel.com. “Layla, I love you, you are the sunshine of my days in the office, my little oriental star,” wrote some unfortunate fiftysomethings, while Layla for her part dreamed of muscular men, virile, poor, and strong: this was the life, basically, as she saw it. Easily identified as a guy whowas “a bit bizarre but nice, not at all dangerous,” Jed benefited with Layla from that kind of
exception of extra-territoriality
that has always been attributed to artists by the
girls
. It is maybe Layla, but more certainly Geneviève, his Malagasy ex-girlfriend, who is recalled in one of his most touching canvases,
Aimée, Escort Girl
, treated with an
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