Profile Image "Les joueurs de cartes musicales (The Music Card Players)"

 

Les joueurs de cartes musicales (The Music Card Players)

TM

(TM writes:)

Photo of Us -- Sensibility, Quietness, and Homage

This is an homage to a particular work, which might be obvious to those familiar with fine art. Would you be able to identify the painter we are paying homage to?

It is based on Les joueurs de cartes (The Card Players) by Paul Cézanne. I created my own version, titled Les joueurs de cartes musicales (The Music Card Players).

Using photographs of ourselves as the basis, I reconstructed the figures from the original painting. Instead of playing cards, the figures are shown holding sheet music -- specifically, small printed versions of the score for Cube 1: Déclencheur, which I then modified and abstracted throughout the image creation process. This piece was conceived around the idea of "what music might sound like if it were composed in the spirit of Cézanne," exploring musical cubism from a conceptual perspective.

Aiming not for precise resemblance but to evoke an atmosphere inspired by Cézanne’s sensibility, I created simulated variations using AI technology from the original photographs of the two. Those were front-facing shots of TI and myself (TM), which were later adjusted to side profiles for the composition, with TI positioned on the left and TM on the right.

While developing the image, I reflected on the works of Johannes Vermeer, particularly his frequent use of downward gaze to create a quiet, introspective mood. In terms of the clothing, it reflects, more or less, what we actually own, and differs from the original painting.

Reality and Unreality Adrift...

In many ways, the scene captured in this image also resembles our actual creative process in music. If the sheet music cards were replaced with computers, it would reflect the kind of quiet dialogue we have across the digital space -- silently observing, reflecting, exchanging ideas and cards (ie, data files), and muttering thoughts to ourselves. There are no instruments visible, and from the outside, it may not even appear that music is being created.

Yet, unlike physical paintings, this image has no real-world materiality -- there are no strokes, no textured surfaces of paint.  In other words, it looks like a photograph of a painting but is not; it is merely a digitally created image. Our music, too, was never meant to have a material form to begin with. This subtle similarity between digital visual work and music, both non-physical in nature, attracts me a lot as well.

I worked across four separate sessions with AI*, sometimes spending over fifteen hours without producing a single usable image. In total, around one hundred takes were necessary to arrive at the final composition.

* It often felt as if I were being supported by four distinct artistic engineers -- Emmy, the other Emmy, Cléo, and Palette -- each contributing their own spirit to the creation process.

There are some parallels between Cézanne and FMT. Cézanne continued to pursue his unique perspective even without broad recognition, focusing on his own view of reality rather than conforming to established norms.

His consistent textures, unstable perspectives, and disregard for conventional composition rules can be compared to our approach to music, where we largely avoid standardised codes. Just as his work was not widely understood during his lifetime, our music may not fit easily within current mainstream frameworks.

After seeing the completed image, TI playfully took a selfie imitating the posture of the "painting," commenting that it felt like bringing himself closer to the image rather than making the image realistic.

Identity Remains.

TI also noticed a structural resemblance to the album cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Solid State Survivor. My homage is, in fact, not only to Cézanne, but also slightly to it. The band, active for only five years, played as pioneers in electronic music and formed an early and crucial part of our musical identity. A cassette copy and the cover of the album are a sort of unforgettable memory for both of us. (It's reflected in our project called "Boyhood Skies.") 

Moreover, the legendary cover was designed by Heiquicci Harata, who happened to know TI personally. Coincidentally, he was raised very near where I grew up.

Although "painting" this work was quite challenging for me, at its core, I regard the independence embodied by Cézanne as central to our creative identity. FMT is pursuing a form of expression that does not demand understanding or agreement, but invites quiet reflection.