https://www.les-nouveaux-riches.

com/self-taught-artist-jet-le-parti/

Self-taught artist. Jet Le Parti

Jet Le Parti is a Philadelphia-based, self-taught artist. With a B.A. in

Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, his intellectual interests
span a variety of topics such as theoretical sciences, mysticism, origin
mythology, and a number of other realms of thought which can be found
present in all of his works.

INTERVIEW: DANIEL LICHTERWALDT PHOTOS: JET LE PARTI

 When and how did you start making art?

My interest in art is kind of intertwined with my childhood. I grew up in a

relatively religious area in the States. The norm was to sort of accepting your
fate undoubtedly – it’s all part of divine purpose. With this as the standard
naturally, there were not many people questioning the nature of reality, the
foundation of their identity, the higher structures governing their day-to-day, etc.
As a questioning child, I constantly found myself as one of the “odd ones out”
so I kept to myself. My family allowed my brother and me to be „free-minded”
as long as we did well in school, so I fell into alignment. I did alright in classes
and played sports like everyone else and eventually, I found myself in
Philadelphia, playing baseball at the University of Pennsylvania.

After a year of following a traditional path and studying

economics, I felt unfulfilled and began reevaluating some of the
ideas that I had repressed over the years.
After a year of following a traditional path and studying economics, I felt unfulfilled and began
reevaluating some of the ideas that I had repressed over the years. I changed my plan to go down a
scholastic track in philosophy to explore these questions, but I soon found academia to be a bit
restrictive and cut-off from the rest of the world. Thus, I tried looking for answers through
experimenting with other avenues which seemed to offer glimpses into a new perception around these
ideas.

However, rather than arriving to something tangible and conclusive, I reached a point as to where I
could no longer express what I wished to express through words – everything became more referential
oriented, things became elusive, thoughts were beyond my understanding and the language I was
familiar with seemed like it could only scratch the surface of what I was reaching for. I tried to explain
it all to myself but I couldn’t find the words – so (naturally) I tried to find other people who may have
them. This is when I began looking into philosophical texts, origin mythologies, modern psychology,
the theoretical sciences, accounts of mathematicians, works of mystics, collections of history, etc. I
wanted to find some trace of objective answers to it all, some chain of associations that put it all
together, but I needed a way of doing it in a holistic manner. This is when I picked up painting
(roughly three years ago now). I didn’t have any idea or background in the practice because I never
really went to museums or cared to as a kid, so I went to the PMA every day throughout the winter to
try and figure out “the rules” of art. I soon felt at home with painting – it was perfect. Rather than for
expression or aesthetic entertainment, painting became an attractive method for recording my
thoughts. It allowed me to bridge the gaps between the hard information I found with my own
phenomenal experience, and the pleasure arises from building these puzzles of sorts to capture it all.

How would you describe the essence of your work?

A big part of my work is making connections. For example, if I’m exploring a metaphysical idea such
as hard determinism it aligns with subjective experiences, like synchronicity. I’d try to find a physical
science account that supports the idea. The mythology that fits the phenomenon may be a
psychologist’s account on delusions and ideas of reference which connects to the phenomenal
qualities. A philosopher that has derived some arguments for and against the stance, such as Spinoza
or Heraclitus, and maybe a poet or visionary that conveys the idea romantically enough in their work
to help imagine a visual scene to create on canvas. I attempt to connect it all until I get something like
this.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

I enjoy the freedom. It’s an escape from the traditional world which is kind of entertaining. I don’t
really like the commercial element of it. I think that monetization fails the purpose – which feels
inauthentic. Despite this, it’s almost a necessity for gaining value or validation in the eyes of the rest
of the world, which is a necessity for being able to reach other people. Nonetheless, I have to
participate to some extent, but as to what extent is in my hands.
I enjoy the freedom. It’s an escape from the traditional world
which is kind of entertaining. I don’t really like the commercial
element of it.

What are you currently working on?

Now that painting has become a relatively familiar process, I feel a bit more comfortable in my shoes.
At least comfortable enough to try different things stylistically and medium wise. I’ve started
experimenting more with film – I think that’s something I’ll try to play with next.

What are your plans for the future?

As of now, I do not really know. I’ve had the opportunity to show my work in shows and also digitally
but after publicizing myself a bit more with the hope of connecting with others, I learned that most
people are not too invested in trying to understand me, my ideas, or really anything outside of their
individually constructed worlds. It seems as if publicity and romanticized fantasies govern how most
people interact with both art and life. I don’t think I will necessarily find what I’m looking for in the
eyes of others, for this reason, I do not see myself continuing to try to be understood, rather plan to
focus more on myself. I’ll try to become more informed and coherent.

Jet Le Parti

https://www.34st.com/article/2020/02/jet-le-parti-philosophy-artist-apartment-studio-t
aking-flight

Meet Jet Le Parti, The Self–Taught Artist Who

Turned his Apartment into a Studio
Artist Spotlight | Jet combines the philosophy of art
with the art of philosophy.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Photo: Sudeep Bhargava

Jet Le Parti (C '20) wasn’t supposed to be an artist.

Coming to Penn from what he describes as “a military family” in the small
city of Columbus, Georgia, Jet’s first time in a museum was going to the
Philadelphia Museum of Art in his first year of college.

This may be fitting, though. In Jet's world, art isn't just color on canvas—it’s
simulation theory, the uncertainty principle, wormholes, and nonlocal
quantum particles. When asked who has influenced his work, Jet named
physicists, psychologists, inventors, and philosophers—“Carl Jung, David
Deutsch, Max Tegmark, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Nikola
Tesla." Not a single artist made the cut.

It didn’t take long to realize that Jet, the up–and–coming artist who is
blowing up on social media, didn't see a difference between thinking about
art and thinking about life. In fact, he believed them to be mutually
inclusive. Refusing to take an art class at Penn, Jet would rather “learn as
much as possible, listen to educated people, read their writings, and keep
asking questions.”

“I've always had this imagination of what if you could step out of one
universe and break it down and see another you and kinda take that place.”
Now, in the second semester of his senior year, Jet has done just this. He
has transformed his Radian apartment into a studio—paintings upon
paintings line the walls, some hanging while others leaned against cluttered
surfaces or were stacked on the ground. He stands in the center of his
labyrinth, paint streaked across his clothes and his shoes an unrecognizable
color. His friends from back home sit in the living
room–turned–art–gallery behind him, one of them manning a DJ set,
another photoshopping pictures, and a third setting up a camera to film the
room. Loud techno music overpowers the already eccentric,
sensory–overloaded gallery, adding a psychedelic feel to the scene.

His bedroom is no exception to the chaos, as pastels and jugs of paint

dominate every surface of the space. A giant wall–sized canvas is the
centerpiece, and Jet explains it has been repainted three times, left outside
to the elements, and even been scraped with a rake.
Photo: Sudeep Bhargava OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

We’ve now entered Jet’s universe, seemingly far away from Penn’s
pre–professional culture, and even further away from the town with one
museum that he was raised in.

“From a young age I asked a lot of questions, and the environment I was in
just told me to go along with it, so I did that. I repressed it and I went along
with it.” As Jet says this, he sits on a chair in his room next to a diverse
collection of physics, philosophy, and math books. I remark that it’s rare for
such a creative mind and free spirit to be so enamored with the definitive
world of science. He doesn’t agree.

“When I grew up I thought people would have answers, but when I got to
school I realized that no one really knows … so I’ve been exploring every
avenue for an answer.” Prior to becoming an artist, he had wanted to be
either a professor or philosopher. Yet, he found the world of academics to
be limiting, creating the stalemate endemic to his whole life. “I thought, ok,
so I've lost my mind. What do I do?”

Art was his release. Where words fall short, art never runs out of things to
say. For someone who has taken a scholarly approach to life’s existential
questions, it comes as little surprise that he refers to painting as “taking
notes” and “breaking down the ongoing conversation in his head.”
“The way I imagine it is I can create these kinds of models and imaginary
spaces and explore these ideas in different realms as I stay here.” His
gallery reflects this—all the paintings are intentionally interconnected. “I'll
leave doors within the painting to give the idea that entering it is a realm in
which you enter another one.” He leaves other clues too, such as miniature
versions of his other paintings in the backdrop of all his art, communicating
the idea that they are all scenes in the same story. Sometimes, he even
embeds secret messages in the form of binary code.

As he walks through the rationale behind one of his paintings, it's

immediately clear that each brush stroke is deliberate, spawned from hours
of close reading on quantum mechanics.

It wasn’t always like this. Jet found Penn through baseball, and through
baseball, he found art. True to his theories of uncertainty, his career as an
artist started in the most unlikely of places. While staying at a house in the
Hamptons for a sports summer training, Jet encountered some art supplies
in the basement and decided to give it a try. His Wednesdays off from
baseball soon became art days, and it wasn’t long before there was no
baseball altogether.

Photo: Sudeep Bhargava OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jet’s last show of his college career is this Friday, February 21.
Appropriately named “Taking Flight”—both a play on words of his name
and a nod to his post–grad plans to live in an artist residency in
Marseilles—the show is a testimony to how far he has come.

Regardless of how much he “plays the game,” Jet has not lost sight of his
reasons for becoming an artist. “Ideally I'll get to a position where I just
have to sell one or two pieces. I want to detach myself from the politics of
art, but at the same time I have to pay rent and eat.”

Ultimately, he hopes that his gallery will provide an answer, or at the very
least, a world in which it is okay to ask questions. “My end–all is to get my
stuff into spaces where people like me can see it...all I really need to do is
reach that one person.”

Jet, translating the binary code in a black and white painting he created in
his earlier days, gives hope to all unlikely artists:

“Don’t worry, we’ve been here before. The hole is our home. We swim as we
drown. Don’t worry about this, just see it through. I know it’ll be okay
because I was once you too.”
http://officemagazine.net/down-rabbit-hole-jet-le-parti

Down the Rabbit Hole

with Jet Le Parti
October 29, 2021

In philosophy class, we are often prompted with the concept of taking

the red pill versus the blue pill. Take one, and you are to live
continuously disillusioned by the mirage of absolutes. However, if you
take the other, your mind could have the possibility of opening up and
experiencing the world for what it actually is: multi-dimensional with
layers that continuously unravel expectations of all that you have
believed to be true.

In his gallery showing, artist Jet Le Parti invites viewers to experience

his soul and all the wandering thoughts that have left him curious
about how the world works. He takes his viewers on a journey that
involves philosophy and psychics, all while translating ideas that are
often hard to verbalize into a trail of where his thoughts have been
and where they will continue to go.

● Text by Cassie Jekanoski

● Photos Courtesy of Jet Le Parti

His pieces reflect the curiosity that many go through as they etch themselves
out of the mundane daily tasks and wonder if there is more to this life than
what we know. However, once you allow your mind to go down the rabbit
hole, it’s nearly impossible to come back.

office had the opportunity to sit down with Jet and pick his brain on how he
started painting and why he chose this medium as his self-expression.

Continue reading below for an exclusive interview.

How has the preparation gone for your opening?

The preparation is going in a very interesting format. We originally got the

space over a course of a couple of days to try and make sure everything's
done right, but some of my paintings are a lot more on the obscure size. I
kind of paint side to side fully on the canvas, and when they tried to
stretching them, they were wrong, so we were two days behind. But
everything's really good now. It's been a learning experience.
This isn't your first one in New York, right?

So I ran a pseudo art show back in the fall. I was really into the philosophy of
film and intersecting that. I had this weird period of time where I was like,
"Okay, I can paint on this two-dimensional canvas." But the real
contemporary artists paint the world in three and four dimensions with space
and time. So I was like, "let's do an art show. Let's get everyone to come."
And what they actually walked into was a reconfigured studio that was
actually kind of a Berlin-style, techno sort of bunker. So we had lights and
the stage. This is my first time doing it here at our show and this is the reason
I moved to New York, was originally just to show my work here.

And are you nervous?

Not really. We were doing a bunch of warehouse raves and a ton of event
organization over the past like six or eight months. I was trying to meet more
people naturally and try to find people who have similar basic interests to
then show them a bit more of who I am.

Sort of like, "this is who I am, this is what I've been working up
towards, now take it for what you want."

One realization when you work in these very intense, intimate, multiple
hours with yourself, you understand how alone you are in them. And you
understand how when you come back to this world that we participate in, it's
only a fraction of who you are and it's only a surface sort of thing. So doing
something like this, I have a room full of my soul on these personal spaces. I
feel more real than reality. The majority of my time and mind are in those
paintings more so than I spend here in this conversation that we're having
now. So I'm showing the people my world, but I'm not expecting them to be
understanding. I just want to open up that conversation and basically share
this experience with everyone for this brief moment of time.

How do raves play into the work you create?

I really do have a deep appreciation for house music and more so how it
culminated the relationship it has with different things, like the
countercultural relationship it has. Also, the type of universal ideas and the
root of it. It's something that's in us, you know. When you follow the history
of it, it's really shaped techno. I think of Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and
these young, black suburban kids in Detroit coming up and trying to imagine
the future. Music strikes notes that are in our past and point us towards the
future to where we can come together and be something that is much more
than what we are now. I think mixing that in with the different philosophies
and the different rounds of thinking has been something that has really kept
me in a trajectory that is believing in the world that exists outside of the
worlds that I'm in. It's something that makes you want to participate and do
more than pessimistically fall out of the picture.

For me, at least when I listen to house music, I get excited on the
inside, my emotions bubble over, it's kind of like a chaoticness that I'm
feeling. And I feel like it really translates into your work itself. You
really have to look for something up close, and you see all these
different things that you might have missed at first glance.

And that's the thing, there's something deeper behind it, especially when you
get into the real roots of it, especially when you get into the more minimal
experiment. We're trying to conceptualize space. The people who are really
kind of approaching what they're doing sonically with an artistic mindset and
they speak that language. And then it's just like, "okay, there's something
other than me that doesn't do what I do." And now I'm tuned into this to make
what I need to make.

Your academic background, your philosophy, your upbringing, how

does that sort of tie into what you produce?

Coming from a space like Georgia where it's a very sort of straightforward,
kind of one-dimensional.

Your typical suburban upbringing.

It's more so just like the type of frames of thinking that govern the body of
people. We have a very limited amount of resources placed upon our
education when compared to other states and other concentrations of people.
We have a large amount of wealth disparity and things like that. So it's the
type of culmination where you have this Christian, more traditional way of
seeing things. And when that is approached to reality you don't bridge into
these spaces of questioning and consideration that really also come into the
picture. You become very aware when you understand more of these
philosophical considerations, the way science and these things relate to the
world, you start realizing really quickly that you as an individual, as an
identity is more constructed by a multitude of these different things that come
together, that resonate to be who you are. I'm more so aware of how these
different sorts of things come together to influence me, the individual. And
then when you really string together, chase, and follow these different
timelines that come together, it brings you into this present moment. You're
like, "what is happening and what is going on?" You are so much more than
what you may construct and think you are. And then when you start asking
yourself, "Well, why am I doing it?" That's going into all these different
realms of knowledge.

So you express yourself through your art, but why painting? Why do
you choose to express yourself through that?

I feel like a lot of the things that I think about and a lot of the things that we
speak about are things that I feel like we're still trying to find like the words
to describe. I think about before language. We go back to the allegory called
Big Bang, but before mankind developed language, we were trying to figure
out the words that describe them to each other. You create an abstraction that
is like a symbol. There's this thing that's flowing through me so passionately
that I have to communicate and I can't find the words for quite yet, but I'm
feeling it taking every bit of me. And then all these different ideas like
physics, science, and spiritual things all culminated and I know I had loose
ideas of them before. But the things that were flowing and coming through
me that felt so important and emerging, were out of my norm. I'm a kid from
Georgia playing baseball so why am I so interested in quantum mechanics
and physics? And I had very limited exposure to that. Then I did philosophy,
cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of physics, mathematics, and the
history of anthropology. I'm making these paintings before this symbolism
that I had no relationship to. I'm like, "What is going on? Why is this in my
unconscious?"

You're scraping away like a madman at four AM.

That's really what my reality was. I was spending every single bit of my
moment not having the words, the access to even the people in my most
intimate sphere, my family, my friends, the people around me. I was
essentially robbed of a voice and experiencing something that I couldn't even
begin to communicate. That's when I had the initial idea that I'm going to try
and take this thing that I'm experiencing and formulate it into a series of
work. So I can communicate something that maybe is there that I'm trying to
find to something that's similar that maybe can work with it at a later point in
time. To resonate with it and turn it into something more I felt like I was
gonna fall out of the picture. So if I'm on the way out, and I'm drowning, let
me try and give someone an indicator, or a message. A note of where to start,
where to go, or at least take something, take this information, as is.

So when was a pivotal moment for you, either through your education
or your art, where you decided that this was the path that you're going
to take? That you were going to continue navigating your mind but
through an artistic standpoint, or an artistic visual lens?

I was always very just curious and interested in how things worked out. I had
a very idolized viewpoint and I wanted to do something that allowed me to
express the same feelings. So I think at some point I kept chasing that drive
to be something that is more. Just be able to channel something that is in me
and I just really wanted to be a good artist. I loosely went into that and then
basically bounced around and experienced things. I took so many steps off of
this line of thinking. This is so much more than I thought it would be.

I think especially even for me discovering all of these nuances of life

and that there's so much more that we can experience because our
mind only lets us experience so much. We're just surrounded by our
own reality rather than going inside.

And I think it's crazy because then you have to ask yourself "What
arrangement of things allowed me like socio-economic environment, parent
demographic, sort of like all these different things that came together to allow
me to access this information?"

That's when you have your basic needs that need to be met before
you can actually start thinking like that.

I guess like that's where the political side sort of slips into the mix because
then it's just a question of, "Wait, where there's so much more."

What would you say is next for you? Where do you see yourself?

Well, that's my relationship with the art world. We have a particular interest
in hands because the people around me have put a lot of thought and effort
that there's a reason that something like this is happening. And the way it's
happening right now, there's so much more to art. Just being the artist as the
individual, you're also the person who pulls the strings behind the scenes.
There's a number of different infrastructures that work out to empower and
disenfranchise individuals as well. So naturally, there's sort of this golden
ticket space that's arriving. There's a typical way that these things can go. But
I have other interests. I am not in the contemporary art world. I'm not trying
to participate in this sort of like art fair, you know, social, I don't really care.
You're doing this for yourself and for the message that you want to convey
for sure. And it's more so to create the opportunity of communication to do
these sorts of things to reach that. That phone line to answer that call or
answer that line of communication to the people I am looking for and other
people who are similar-minded.