Willy Le Maitre, Cézanne’s 3D Heir?

THE DAILY PIC (#1547): Two years ago, Willy Le Maitre showed lenticular prints at Canada gallery in New York. Instead of using them to show two barely different views of the same scene, to make it look 3D – think of the little images that used to come in Crackerjack boxes – Lemaitre used his lenticulars to collide utterly different images.

This month, Lemaitre is back at Canada with more of the same, except that it feels as though he has really perfected his new medium.  Le Maitre’s viewers no longer switch back and forth between the two images, duck-rabbit-wise, but are now more thoroughly caught in a transitional space between them, as though trapped in some kind of hideous malfunction of the Star Trek transporter beam.

Folk dancers in Eastern European costume merge seamlessly with someone who seems to be fixing a KFC sign – or rather not seamlessly at all, but rather all-and-only seam, all the time. It’s like the apotheosis of all the modernist montages and collages that hoped to blur the world’s usual boundaries, but never really could. (They always read as bits of stuff glued together in the most standard way.) Indeterminacy has been one of the crucial bywords of modern art at least since the time of Cézanne and Picasso. Now Le Maitre has delivered on those masters’ promises.

For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.