John Reitz

Composition to machines and tools

1945

Smart painter, full of humor and creativity. Something “baconian”. An immediate shift, a desire to play. found in all his work. We are dealing with a radiant artist. Of those who pretend nothing, however, are wary of any pose, which probably explains why John Reitz has fallen through the cracks of time. Nobody knows him. There are thus several of them in Geneva, perhaps this observation should be attributed to the ambient culture; here, any flashy exhibition, until recently, was experienced as suicidal. It is hardly surprising that in the wake of this deceptive realism John Reitz tried his hand at constructivism. Even less that he surprises us by throwing himself into it with consummate art on the contrary: the mechanism of his complications seems as if crushed by the extraordinary luminosity with which he manages to deck them out, cutting the grass under the foot in any pragmatic discourse. The man John Reitz is no longer there, but his work is so alive! A late teacher at the School of Decorative Arts in Geneva, he made an incursion into the world of fashion which shows how much he was not fooled. His brilliant art deco triptych screen puts a definitive end to constructivism and his portrait sketch of the singer Marie Dubas unleashes a smile that brings us back to his own, in the first photo of him mentioned at the beginning of this text. An artist, as Tamara and Olivier Veyrat aptly write, “with a modest posture. But that should not prevent each and everyone from placing themselves according to their desire in the general movement of art.