2 - 1990 - Painting bearing a short message translated into alpha-numeric bar codes (EAN 39). Can be decoded and displayed on screen through the use of an optical eading device.

3 - 1995 - "Les pixels du peintre" (the painters'pixels) picture by assembly. Acrylic painting on canvas + cardboard box with silk-screen printing. 60 x 60 or 30 x 30 cm.

4 - 1988 - Caskets with coded messages, engraved by stripping on shoots of varying kinds of wood : beech, maple, sycamore, oak. Acrylic painted back. Sanded text. Varying dimensions.

In 1975 Jean-Paul Albinet founded with Alain Snyers and Philippe Cazal the GROUP UNTEL. Under this label they put together numerous expositions and street shows (Happenings) and, at the 10th Biennal of Paris in 1977, they created a prototypical department store environment based on daily life in an urban milieu. This work of symbolic " distortion " already contained the conceptual elements that one finds again in his work today. In 1984 he produced works based on the stained-glass form, featuring in it the bodies and silhouettes that one finds in fashion magazines and advertising slogans.

In 1987 he began to introduce into his paintings a sign strongly influenced by bar codes. The importance of this sign - which is the base of a universal language - and its role in society has become the principal subject of his work. He has put into place an interactive mechanism, a subtle change in function from a mode of transmitting computer data, and has integrated into a series of paintings bar codes that can be decoded using an optical reading device. Using it, one can discover on the screen the ideas put into place by the artist.

In 1990 Gencod EAN France granted him, in conformity with his request and in his capacity as producer of paintings, sculpture and objet d’art, the conceptual identification number 337731. All of his works have since carried this number. In 1992 he made his own alphabet book, created from a hybridisation of international bar code language. He can, by using this, record manually words and phrases in several languages on whatever materials that appeal to his imagination : paintings on canvas, engraved wood, video, interventions in situ etc..

In 1995 he proposed a series of modular works on the base of a square painting (60 x 60 cm) that can be assimilated to the PIXEL (Picture element), the smallest constituent unit in the system of transmitting numerical images. These works, which are always coded in matching tones (monochrome), are no longer simply abstract creations as they become in the logic of this ironic and relevant idea the element of images. They constitute the latest touch of the painter. Here again, Albinet pursues his work/study on the relations between the image and language in our contemporary visual universe by introducing into his very practice as a painter tools refined from numerical images and computer systems.