Some Paintings from The Map and the Territory

The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting: The expressions of Pernaut’s staff, listening to the directives of their charismatic leader with a curious mixture of veneration and disgust, had not been easy to render.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto: Jobs ... seemed paradoxically an embodiment of austerity, or the Sorge traditionally associated with Protestant capitalism. There was nothing Californian in the way his hand clutched his jaw as if to help him some difficult reflection. 

The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse: Reminiscent of the expressionist period, we are very far from the scathing, caustic treatment of a George Grosz or an Otto Dix...His traders in running shoes and hooded sweatshirts, who acclaim with blasé world-weariness the great German porn businesswoman, are the direct descendants of the suited bourgeois who meet endlessly in the receptions directed by Fritz Lang. 

Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher and Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager: if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their probable disappearance; it was simply that they were indeed going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas. 

Aimée, Escort Girl: A fulfilled young woman, both sensual and intelligent ... treated with an exceptionally warm palette based on umber, Indian orange, and Naples yellow. 

The Engineer Ferdinand Piech Visiting the Production Workshops at Molsheim: The wide V-shaped formation of the small group of engineers and mechanics following Piech on his visit to the workshops recalled very precisely ... the group of agronomists and middle-poor peasants accompanying President Mao Zedong in a watercolor reproduced in issue 122 of China in Construction, entitled Forward to Irrigated Rice Growing in the Province of Hunan! 

Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market: The night itself wasn't right: it didn't have that sumptuousness, that mystery one associates with nights on the Arabian Peninsula; he should have used a deep blue, not ultramarine. He was making a truly shitty painting. He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst's eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen fibers, and therefore very tough. 

Michel Houellebecq, Writer: Martin probably chose to portray him in the middle of a universe of paper neither to make a statement about realism in literature nor to bring Houellebecq closer to a formalist position ... Without doubt, more simply, he was taken by a purely plastic fascination with the image of these branching blocks of text, engendering one another like some gigantic octopus.