nico maestu: statement

French / American image and audio explorer / gatherer around LA > Painting / Photography / Video / Film / Music / Collage

Nico Maestu is a French-American artist who lives and works in Southern California from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, where he has worked in multiple media since attending Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles (BFA in photography, painting, video art) focusing on the intersection, translation, and processing of images between painting, photography, video, and film. Maestu also received graduate degrees (MA, CPhil) from the University of California, Los Angeles in Film and Media Studies and has incorporated imagery from films, music, television, as well as the art world in his image and audio explorations of popular culture in and surrounding Los Angeles.

Maestu’s works incorporate concepts from art movements such as the Surrealist’s unconscious, Dada’s meaninglessness, the Situationists Internationalist’s dérive, détournement, and creative geography, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and the Pictures’ generation’s reimagining of the meaning and (re)presentation of images. Major artist influences are: Luc Tuymans, John Baldesseri, Richard Prince, Hilary Pecis, Andreas Gursky, Henry Taylor, Jonas Wood, Alex Katz, Jack Goldstein, Pipilotti Rist, Douglas Gordon, Ed Ruscha, Gerhard Richter, Uta Barth, Jenna Gribbon, among others. Key concepts that influence the works are: process, translation, montage, repetition, language, remix, intertextuality, cultural recyclability, collage, drift, and gleaning.

Maestu also works with sound through video, films, and the band \_tear_me_apart_/ — inspired by sound art, noise music, minimal music, and drone music with influences from Christian Marclay, Paul Pfeifer, John Cage, Kim Gordon, Jim Jarmusch, and others who are at the intersection of multiple media.

Maestu has been working as an artist and a college/university professor in Film and Media Studies at Santa Barbara City College, where he is Chair and a tenured professor. He has taught at many colleges and universities throughout Southern California.

Nico Maestu works in multiple media — painting, photography, video/film, and sound/music — exploring what the Situationist International’s Guy Debord described in the 1960s as the détournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The following ideas are critical concepts to Maestu’s approach to art: Visual Debris / Gleaning / Simplicity / Walking / Recycling / Elimination / Cultural Citation / Collage / Automation / Photo Montage / Material Sampling / Hybridity / Drift / Intertextuality / Technology / Reduction / Abstraction / Paraphrasing / Inter-textual Citation / Cultural Recyclability / Recontextualization / Remix Culture / Cultural Criticism / Minimalism / Détournement / Dérive.

Maestu is interested in the process of art production and image making in which chance, restrictions, limitations through the capture of images and making of works allows specifically for technology to influence and determine the outcome of a work. He points to parts of images/locations/films in physical and digital forms so as to create new meanings through juxtapositions and montages of images that surround him, whether while walking through Los Angeles, watching films, or scrolling through social media. He looks for the in-between spaces through a minimalist aesthetic where the questioning of perception is central. He sees himself as passively active — allowing the world of images to filter through him and become works in various media — artist/bands/filmmakers such as John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Hilary Pecis, Jonas Wood, Jenna Gribbon, Sigmar Polke, Henry Taylor, Douglas Gordon, Christian Marclay, The Velvet Underground, Tsai Ming-liang, Sofia Coppola, Gaspard Noë, Uta Barth, William Eggleston, Paul Pfeifer, and others are highly influential for Maestu.

Art making is a lifestyle for him in which art influences life, and life affects the art. He allows for randomness, accidents, time constraints, technique, proficiency, context, setting, health, mood, pop culture to determine the outcome of the work. Gerhard Richter’s painting of everyday life is critical to Maestu’s practice. He works on multiple projects at once on a daily basis in painting, photography, video/film, and sound/music, all informing each other. His interest is in making works daily similarly to the way Luc Tuymans works on one painting a day. It’s a daily practice that is determined by everyday activities, which in turn prompts the work that is produced.

Maestu’s paintings/photos/videos point to images stemming from films, social media, and walking through Los Angeles, a central activity to his art production. The paintings take on a flat aesthetic reminiscent of minimalism all the while focused on where ‘the window and the frame’ merge. His photos are abstract as well as representational focused on the organization of shapes and movements. His videos are reductive — they eliminate common film tropes. His music/sound revolve around repetition and drones. He is an image and audio explorer who looks for images and sounds in his everyday reality and in multiple media.

For Maestu, making art is a way to make sense of the world by finding images and turning them into a physical manifestation through painting, photography, video/film, and sound/music. Central to his practice is, what can be art?

Visual debris / Gleaning / Dreams / Representation / Simplicity / Gesture / Walking / Recycling / Elimination / Cultural citation / Collage / Automation / Photo Montage / Material Sampling / Hybridity / Drift / Intertextuality / Technology / Emulation / Reduction / Abstraction / Paraphrasing / Inter-textual Citation / Borrowing / Technique Destruction / Cultural Recyclability / Recontextualization / Remix Culture / Cultural Criticism / Minimalism / Détournement / Dérive / Creative Geography

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there … Guy Debord

Détournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. Guy Debord

Looking Awry. Slavoj Žižek

“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objetive is not getting its adherents to listen top convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.” Guy Debord

The painting of everyday life

Where the window and the frame merge

Technology / Cameras / Chance / Restrictions / Remix / Reuse / Simplification / Lifestyle / Vicariousness / Insularity / Solipsistic / Sculptural images / Process / Limit technique / Daily practice / Wandering / Day dreams / Unconscious / Passivity / Meaninglessness / Creative geography

Luc Tuymans / Bruce Nauman / John Kacere / John Baldessari / Richard Prince / Fairfield Porter / Gabriele Münter / Hilary Pecis / Jonas Wood / Alex Katz / Pierre Bonnard / Édouard Vuillard / Henry Matisse / Manny Farber / Jean Dubuffet / Pierre Alechinsky / Jean-Michel Basquiat / Gerhard Richter / Jacques Villeglé / Harmony Korine / Judith Eisler / Rosalyn Drexel / Mark Lewis / Pipilotti Rist / Mark Tansey / Mommy Rotella / Jenna Gribbon / Jason Fox / David Shirgley / Brice Marden / Gary Hume / Mary Weathetford / Gary Simmons / Franz Kline / Ana Hatherly / Jennifer Bartlett / Marylin Minter / Peter Doig / Georg Baselitz / Sigmar Polke / Martin Kippenberger / Josh Smith / Jonathan Lasker / Alfred Jensen / Stefan Brüggemann / Jack Goldstein / Issy Wood / Henry Taylor / Amy Adler / Oscar Murillo / Lisa Brice / Robert Ryman / Lisa Yuskavage / Nate Lowman / Isaac Julien / Douglas Gordon / Yves Klein / Christian Marclay / René Magritte / Situationists International / Surrealism / Minimalism / Film/Art / Experimental music / Montage / Abstract music / Minimal music / Drone music / The Velvet Underground / The Cramps / The Raevonettes / The White Stripes / The Dead Weather / The Kills / Radiohead / The Pixies / PJ Harvey / The Clash / Gary Numan / Sqürl / Visage / Serge Gainsbourg / Dub Reggae / King Tuby / Lee Scratch Perry / Jacob Miller / Big Youth / Björk / My Bloody Valentine / Sisters of Mercy / Janes Addiction / The Smashing Pumpkins / The Brian Jonestown Massacre / The Allah Las / Bauhaus / EKKSTACY / Molchat Doma / She Wants Revenge / Sonic Youth / My Chemical Romance / Spacemen 3 / Arc de Soleil / Céline Sciamma / Wong Kar-wai / Agnés Varda / Sofia Coppola / Roy Anderson / Claire Denis / Tsai Ming-liang / Kelly Reichardt / Mia Hansen-Løve / Yorgos Lanthimos / Steve McQueen / David Lynch / Bong Joon-ho / Ruben Ostlund / Samuel Fuller / Gaspard Noë / Asghar Farhadi / Park Chan-wook / Andy Warhol / Gus Van Sant / Uta Barth / William Eggleston / Tina Barney / Edward Steichen / Helmet Newton / Irving Penn / Anton Corbjin / Jo Ann Callis / Richard Avedon / Nan Goldin / Larry Clark / Thomas Ruth / Thomas Struth / Andreas Gursky / Takashi Homma / Paul Jasmin / Jeff Wall / Bernd and Hilla Becher / Guy Bourdin / Les Friedlander / Gregory Crewdson / Stephen Gill / Thomas Ruff / Wolfgang Tillmans / Paul Pfeifer

2000: How does one perceive and understand the material world? Does one simply recognize what surrounds them in order to act upon the world? What assumptions are made about what is perceived? How can the moving image, as in video and film, influence one's perception and one's understanding of the material world and the inter-relationships between matter? How can one's perception be the source of self-constitution and the impetus for social relations?

Perception is of crucial importance in one's relationship to the physical world surrounding each individual. In the way that one perceives, one is able to make sense of matter and, thus, pass judgements upon it, that is to say, to recognize in the present what seems to be similar to what had been noticed in the past. It becomes clear through an analysis of particular aspects of perception in the works of Henri Bergson, Giles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek, that perception determines one's identity and one's social placement within a network of individuals that may be referred to as the Symbolic Order. Bergson is important for his investigation in the physiological and psychological process of representation and perception through memory and time. His analysis is mostly based on the past's relationship to the present, a present that is in many ways never apparent, as it turns into a past before the present is even clear. Lacan, on the other hand, attempts to understand in a psychoanalytic dimension the process by which memory, and, thus, assumptions about matter, contributes to the attempt at begetting an identity for the perceiver. This process and endeavor at classification creates a network of inter-social relationships between individuals that exists solely through the deceptive nature of perception. This perception is not only visual, but also auditory and, thus, can be understood as linguistic. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty states in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, "communication of consciousness is not possible; my word simply gives other people a chance to remember what they already know[1]." It is for this seemingly simple reason that interpretation is entirely detached from what it is interpreting. The perceiver never looks at what one perceives, but rather at what one knows about what seems to be placed in front of them. Perception and interpretation, thus, reveal more about the perceiver or interpreter and the social relations one belongs to than about the matter that is perceived, since pure perception, as Bergson explains, is impossible because of one's memory-image stemming from the past.

It then becomes clear that perception is more complex and more revealing than previously assumed. It is the starting point of all forms of communication and social associations, and, thus, determines them. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek uses Lacan's work in order to expand it from the individual to ideology by way of Marx and Freud. Zizek investigates the difference between the Real (of an individual) and ideology (Symbolic Order). The Real causes the object of desire in the individual by way of the lacanian gaze and, thus, guides that person’s actions. Isn’t one’s real similar to the ideology flowing through that person? As Zizek states: “The theoretical intelligence of the form of dreams does not consist in penetrating from the manifest content to its ‘hidden kernel’, to the latent dream-thoughts; it consists in the answer to the question: why have the latent dream-thoughts assumed such a form, why were they transposed into the form of a dream[2].” That is to say why does the illusion that one constructs take on the form that it does? Why is the interpretation of what I perceive taking on the form that it does? Simply said, why am I interpreting matter in the way that I do? The rebus, what is left when the unconscious (Symbolic) is transformed into the conscious (reality), is where the symptom can be located. This symptom is the point at which a breakdown is realized that subverts its own universal foundation, “a species subverting its own genus[3].” It is the moment when the illusion created by the individual is destroyed, at which point the individual finds themselves confronted with the reality of their desire and not by a perception through the Symbolic.

Deleuze continues Bergson's investigation into time, movement, and duration but applies it to the moving image. Deleuze’s investigations into film and its construction are important for the understanding of how the viewer perceives. Not only is each image considered an entity from which to generalize, but also each image-movement becomes a set that when related to other sets changes the whole: the immobile causes mobility. As Deleuze explains, perceiving is subtracting all that does not enter the symbolic order as created by the individual.

My work takes on the form of video, film, photography, music, collage, and painting. With notions of filmmaking -- editing, panning, sound, movement, montage -- and theoretical models as described above, the work is an investigation of film, its process, and its construction, and the role of memory in the reception and perception of the work. It is an attempt to analyze the process of perception and the assumptions made by the viewer when comforted with matter. I consider my physical work presented to an audience to be simply matter that is possibly more likely to be perceived attentively because of the situation it is placed in as a 'work of art.' As Bergson states, "there are then, in short, diverse tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life[4]." Although these theories have influenced my art production, they are in no way representative of the work itself. They are simply proposition to the discussion of the work, one possible manner to approach it.

[1] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Northwestern University Press. Illinois: 1979. p. 4.

[2] Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso. New York: 1997. p. 11.

[3] Ibid. p.21.

[4] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Zone Books. New York: 1991. p. 14.