Dots, Chance, Pots, Dance

Jean-Baptiste Maitre describes his artistic practice as “filmmaking without a camera.” This approach yields an utterly personal cinema that sometimes takes the form of sculptures or paintings. Maitre makes his artworks using the digital film techniques that he mastered during his previous career in the advertising industry. But he also produces moving images. One example is Shaped Cinema (2010), for which he printed the pages of a museum catalogue on the artist Frank Stella directly onto 35mm film, causing the images to vibrate restlessly. Although Maitre makes frequent reference to the minimalist idiom of the 1970s, his work also betrays the influence of experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. His concealing of a political message beneath a layer of absurdism suggests he is also inspired by the interwar Dadaist art movement. In The Looting of the Museum (2014), he focuses on the sloppy handling of Iraqi cultural heritage after the fall of Saddam Hussein, endlessly repeating news footage of art thieves to underline the almost inconceivable enormity of the crime. Dots, Chance, Pots, Dance might best be viewed as a bitterly poetic sequel in which abstract Islamic motifs dance like deranged whirling dervishes.