Autoportrait/Zelfportret

‘As a child I always thought that one day you would simply be back. How could I have imagined that I had lost you for good? I thought I saw the same skies and treetops that I had seen when you pushed me around the garden in my pram. The many flowers in our garden reminded me of your beauty. Their smell seemed to connect me to you.’

Jed Martin – the main character in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory – was born near Paris in 1975 as the son of an architect and a violinist. He initially worked as an object photographer, but later became popular in the visual arts with series of manipulated photos of Michelin roadmaps. He called this extensive series The map is more interesting that the territory. Martin’s relationship with reality was based almost exclusively on his visual language… Until now.

When he is forty years old, Martin writes a letter to his dead mother. She was as old as he was then, when she decided to take her own life. The combination of his words and his visual work results in a compelling self-portrait of a contemporary artist.