Inside the Mind and Work of UNC Charlotte's Jade Marteau
For a while now I’ve been monitoring myself, kind of like a lab rat. Before I start painting, I try to assess what I do, what I'm listening to, what I’m consuming and with whom I’m doing it.
I’ve been analyzing how those factors come into place in my paintings; observing the way I behave around those thoughts, and how it shows in my creative process.
Analyzing myself, like a software engineer looking at a code and considering its behavior.
Our brains are like the mother board, something that controls but can also be controlled. The question is, who do we let in?
All that we perceive isn’t real. You choose your reality. Acknowledging that everyone and everything is experiencing today differently than you. Removing the singularity of our world, the singularity of how we think. When we do that, who can we become?
My art is about recognizing the complexity of our society, how everything is layered and trying to simplify it is the origin of a lingering ache. Everything and everyone is different. The desire to impose a viewpoint will hurt something, someone. We destroy and create, it’s a cycle that we have to embrace. Even more so, you must embrace yourself, your difference, so you won’t condemn the different world you live in; you will honor it.
The reason we feel this ache is because we pretend to understand, to know. Stop and look around, question, be curious, be empathic; to yourself and others.
I want to invite onlookers to understand it however they want, to see whatever beauty they find in it, even if it’s none. Like the gift of the sky they can choose to savour the beauty of it. It’s all about perspective, and I’ve realized how much my brain plays into it. That’s why my art is big and colorful, only if you find beauty in those things can you recognize its value. It’s all about your personal reality.
Jade Marteau
About The Art
“Froid Moumoute” 5ftx6ft
This piece is the first abstract layered portrait I’ve done. It was one of the hardest to produce, trying to keep the colors vibrant and cohesive at the same time. It is a portrait of a very important person, a mind that inspires me. A friend that makes me realize the complexity that we can’t explain. Her being blinded is what prevents her from seeing how layered and complicated everything is. Something that impairs us to some degree. This is why I chose to make a very layered and busy visual. Once again showing a complexity that is both intangible and playful at the same time.
“Femme Bleu” 3ftx4ft
“Femme Bleu”is one of my first very graffiti layered processes on unstretched canvas. This is a representation of the inner female, conveying the beauty and the complexity of what being feminine is/means. Challenging the idea of beauty and how it is perceived and measured in our society.I played around with the idea of beauty, using mostly pink and blue, creating flower-like forms. Romanticizing a system that oppresses the expressions of self, that forces a vision and reduces creativity.
“Ecosystem 1” 13ftx7ft
This piece was created to challenge the idea of a system and how it forms. I treated this piece like a giant sketchbook, it was like a laboratory for me. Letting myself experiment while observing the results.This piece was about play, and the clumsiness that comes with it. Being able to just play with colors and marks, trying to find my own language and what it means. I constructed this very layered and maximalistic system. To me this piece shows a diverse, layered and confusing system. I was not painting with a specific thesis but I think the dilemma constructed itself. How organized can we be when everything around us isn't tangible enough to understand ? It represents weeks of analyzing our society and how complicated it is.