J. P.



it_was_the_moment.png
Acrylic [and ink] on paper 
150 x 100 cm
2024
From the shore you shall laugh, in safety, at the waves or rather at those who are wave tossed.

Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things


an email? I ask. It was on Vanity Fair’s website that I read about the artist Christian Rosa driving around in a Ferrari and listening to rap music, I think. It hinted the Ferrari was purchased with money the onceartworlddarling Rosa made selling forgeries of Raymond Pettibon wave paintings. The nerve of this guy (Christian Rosa) driving around in a Ferrari and listening to rap, the tone of the writer of the piece in Vanity Fair implied, I think. I click to go back to my search results and see a link for the FBI’s website. The FBI Art Crimes Division? I ask. On the case’s page are photos of the faked paintings; photos that—I will assume moving forward—were taken by one of their agents. The thumbnails are small so I click on one to get a better look at the forgeries. The image doesn’t enlarge. It’s the same size as the thumbnail. The thumbnail is the image, I think. I download the files. They’re 225 pixels wide, vary in height and roughly 75 KB. I stretch these images to the original painting sizes in centimeters—according to the site—and as expected the pixels stand out at this scale. Is this how the FBI sees paintings? do they only need these images at the lowest possible definition so that they, the images, only suggest the paintings? I ask. I decide to make new paintings of these resized images in the original materials (acrylic on paper), again according to the case details. Allegedly, Rosa stole unfinished paintings directly from Pettibon’s studio as the two were buddies at the time—Christian then finished them on his own. Maybe they were unauthorized, illegal collaborations, I think. Experts say that the placement and style of the text bubbles and the use of green paint are un-Pettibon. Now that these paintings of low quality images of fake paintings taken by the FBI exist, is it now a collaboration among Pettibon, Rosa, the FBI agent/photographer, and me? I ask. In these pixelatedimagebased versions, the black paint is no longer black, but a combination of dark blues, the cobalt not cobalt but a mix of shades that suggest cobalt, the white has pink and blue shades, the paper is painted in as I assume is the glass that covers the framed original fakes. The language is no longer language but illegible marks suggesting language. The green remains. Fakes of fake Pettibons. But no, I think. To see the original fakes in these paintings you have to squint at them, and to squint at something is to be suspicious of the thing you’re squinting at. A unique factor of forgeries—of your mom’s signature or of a major artwork—is time; usually the forger spends more of it on the copy than the original maker does on the original. A trivial gesture can become a calculated maneuver, I think. Who gets to call the FBI? or is it