This year, Jean Pierre will be working on a new project called 7×7.

The concept

• 7 notes of the scale
• 7 colours in a rainbow
• 7 days in a week
• 7 wonders of the world
• 7 samurais
• 7 ages in a life
• 7 virtues & 7 sins
• 7 dwarves for snow white
• …

An installation of 7 works of art by one painter and 7 musicians.

Each work takes the shape of one letter corresponding to a note (A to G) and has a dominant colour corresponding to one of the colours of the rainbow. All seven paintings « play » concurrently, their volume raised and lowered in response to an electronic device, developed by Greg Bertrand, which is integrated in each work allowing for the music to emerge from the picture as the viewer approaches the art work (speakers are hidden in the structure). The sound increases and decreases in response to the viewer’s proximity.

The Musicians

Jean Pierre has approached musicians whose work he profoundly admires. All these musicians have a very strong popular appeal, but have developed their audience without sacrificing their interest in creative and experimental work. As this project is an experimental one, Jean Pierre is calling on an exploratory creativity.

Confirmed participants

Archie Shepp, Coltrane’s disciple and ever daring experimentalist, from his free jazz days and funky politic statements to his recent collaboration with Moroccan gnawa musicians.

Nile Rodgers, not only is one of the world’s most revered producers, but also the inventor of a unique guitar sound.

Sean O’Hagan, leader of the High Llamas and member of Stereolab, producer and arranger for a.o. the Super Furry Animals, the Kaiser Chiefs, Brian Wilson.

Kassin, one of the most exciting names in Brazilian music. He has produced records by singers like Marisa Monte and Bebel Gilberto and has played bass for Caetano Veloso’s live shows and masterminded the Orquestra Imperial project.

Robert Wyatt, former member of the Soft Machine, he is England’s most beautiful voice and one of its most revered musicians

Véronique Müller (VM) : If one sticks to your training1, at the beginning, you are a silk-screen printer. Though, very quickly, you mixed painting with serigraphy.Therefore, you even invented a technique. Then, why this mixture of styles? Why not only painting or only serigraphy?

Jean Pierre Muller (JPM) : For me, serigraphy (screen-printing) is in the first place a means of keeping the gesture at bay, to screen it. The gesture that everyone awaits from the painter, the enchanting gesture of the wise Japanese calligrapher, this moment of danger and emotion… eh well, this gesture, I need to keep it remote, through the serigraphy screen.

VM : Painting, guilty?

JPM : Yes, there was a time, not long ago, when painting was guilty. Where it was not well seen to be a painter, to make painting. Beyond that, there was probably the fact that my father was a painter. I love to paint, and I think I’m good at it. But for me, there is something too much in painting.

VM : Listen, I will make supermarket psychoanalysis. Would you say that this too much is a “too much pleasure”? Something about… the painting that drives insane? Hm, let me explain: there was a time when I wanted to paint. I needed sometimes, between two brush strokes, to run in all the directions in my apartment. I had believed that it was because of our father. That painting was his thing. You, you got over this. Beyond that, our particular anecdotes, I think of the way Kandinsky spoke about colour. What makes me speak about “too much pleasure” in painting is thus, on one side, our sacred father, and on the other, from a historical point of view, painting became that thing one can’t do any more, prohibited. Making it obviously all the more extreme. Would serigraphy have allowed you, as you say, to cut through this, to apply a screen, to humanize this too much which would be like too much life?

VM : Yes, that’s right. That this work must be done in a kind of oblivion of painting, a moment of tabula rasa. It would mean that you do this work to reinvent painting..

Let me go back what you just said about your own syncretism: what you like, you say, is that “everything is at the same level ». As for myself, what pleases me is that it pleases you. It speaks of the possibility of “doing with” a state of fact that is already readymade. What Duchamp’s Ready Made  is acknowledging is that the industrial object, the capitalist object loses its manufacturing process. Orphan of its manufacture – in fact, let me later come back to this, and ask you about your work in the studio. Our objects are readymade, they passed through a chain of work, a production line, they do not sweat any more. The object comes to us only with its retail price. As Jacques-Alain Miller points out this year in his class, objects have lost their quality, they have become a simple matter of quantity, of numbers. At that moment, what does actually distinguish an object from another? Duchamp talked about our age as the age of impotence. Doing is impossible. And even choice. He turns to the word, the Witz, the mot d’esprit (witticism). He says, the value is still there, in the possibility of ambiguity, which is fundamentally human. And radically, he gives up the manufacturing of the object .

If “everything is worth everything, and nothing is worth nothing”, it is also because there is nothing left but pleasure and consumption to be flattered; an object, then another, in the oblivion from the foregoing and the lust for the next. In consumption and impulse, one enjoys but doesn’t think. Impulse is acephalous, says Lacan, and satisfied with any object, says Freud. And yet, it would be inappropriate of me to just spit on this mandatory pleasure. With the condition, I would say, that it finds back its conditions. These conditions can only be those of desire. Which restores a distance to the object. Duchamp’s choice is the word, the bon mot. On the one hand, the bons mots are virtually the material for each of your titles, on the other hand, your work is a work of framing, extraction, electing. A screen, a (re-)connection.

JPM : Yes, yes, yes, there is selection, extraction, choice of connections. I do not think that everything is art. Or rather, everything is art (sooner or later), but an art that is not directed only at the one who’s busy with it is necessarily risky. Not because it provokes (provocation is an academic), but because of what it provokes, the unspeakable disappointment ( “This new picture has also failed to contain the whole universe”). There is something very difficult to approach without falling into the scents of incense : mystery.

VM : Mystery would be what today hardly matters in the object’s value. What goes beyond its figure.

JPM : I strongly believe that the artist is just a vehicle, a lightning rod. There is a wonderful early painting by Sigmar Polke showing, on the upper right corner of a white canvas, a black triangle. And he writes on the bottom of the canvas, “Superior powers told me: Paint a black triangle in the upper right corner” 4. It is exactly what I’m talking about. It is the greater or lesser availability of the artist as a vehicle that makes this mystery more or less crucial. For example, in Thelonious Monk’s case, the submission is complete, at the cost of the artist’s mental health. But what a legacy!

Brussels-Paris, November 2007 – January 2008

(thank you Junior for correcting the translation)