► Expositions personelles ► Ménerbes 2010

 

Jonathan Meyer est né à Santa Cruz, en Californie en 1966. Il étudie l'architecture à l'Université de Lawrence au Kansas. En 1990, il obtient son diplôme d’architecture avec distinction.
Après s’être installé à Londres pour un poste d’architecte, il a été l’assistant du peintre paysagiste Philip Hughes et de Tom Phillips (A Humument : Les variantes et variations).
Jonathan Meyer a commencé à travailler sur ses propres peintures, tout en enseignant le design et l’architecture à la Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. La plupart de ses idées développées dans son travail d'enseignement influencent son travail à l’atelier, et vice versa. Plus notable a été une année passée à l'observation et la compréhension de la relation entre les oiseaux et les animaux migrateurs avec les frontières et les territoires.
En 1997, il quitte la Bartlett School pour se consacrer entièrement à la peinture. Son travail est influencé par les sciences naturelles et leurs interactions avec le peuple, l'histoire, la musique, l’architecture, le tourisme, le commerce, l’informatique et la culture.
Il a eu deux expositions personnelles à la Galerie Beardsmore de Londres et a participé à de nombreuses expositions collectives et foires d'art contemporain. En 2005, il a eu une exposition personnelle intitulée WHITEOUT au « Level 4 », à Bruxelles.
 

Ses travaux figurent dans des collections publiques et privées au Royaume-Uni, en France, Belgique, Pays-Bas, Etats-Unis et Australie.

__________

Jonathan Meyer was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1966. He studied Architecture and Engineering at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, graduating with Honours in Architecture in 1990.
After a summer travelling, he moved to London to work as an architect, having several small projects built. Between the years 1992 and 1994 he stepped up his interest in the art world and was apprenticed to the painter Philip Hughes and also worked on projects with Tom Phillips (A Humument: Variants and Variations).
Jonathan Meyer began working on his own paintings whilst teaching architectural design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Many of the ideas developed in the teaching work crossed over into studio production, and vice versa. Most notable was a year spent examining the relations between bird and animal migration in the natural world and the conventional understanding of boundary and territory in architecture. Subsequent topics developed through the following teaching years were camouflage, mimicry and evolutionary niche adaptation.
He left the Bartlett to become a full time painter in 1997 and his work continues to be informed by the natural sciences and their (sometimes very oblique) influences on and interactions with people, books, music, buildings, tourism, commerce, computers and popular culture.
He has had two one-man shows in London at the Beardsmore Gallery and has participated in many group shows and contemporary art fairs. He has work in private and corporate collections in the UK, France, USA and Australia. An exhibition of his work entitled Whiteout will be on show at Level Four in Brussels in November 2005. 

__________

« Les artistes ne peuvent rien cacher. Tout ce que nous avons aimé, trouvé intrigant, ou ce qui nous a blessé, init par sortir. Les couleurs intensément séductrices en bandeaux évocateurs de Jonathan Meyer amadouent l’espace devant un fond blanc cassé en relief, arborant quelques-uns des mêmes secrets que ceux chéris par les Aztèques, Byzance au coin du feu avec le Mexique. Son oeuvre incorpore les essentiels. Elle est profondément agréable à l’oeil, provocatrice pour l’esprit et bénéique à nos êtres ».

« Artists can hide nothing, all we have loved, been intrigued or hurt by comes out. Jonathan Meyer’s  intensely  seductive  colours  tame  space  in evocative  bands  over  a  near-white background in relief harbouring some of the same secrets the Aztecs cherished: Byzantium having a cozy chat with Mexico. His work embodies the essentials. It is deeply agreeable to  the  eye,  provocative  to  the  spirit  and  rewarding  to  our  most  profound  selves ».

Joe Downing - 2005 (texte pour l'exposition de Ménerbes en 2010)

__________

Expositions personnelles :

__________

Level 4
Studiotrope
Circustraat 9
1000 Brussels Belgium

Meyer’s ongoing preoccupation with the detritus of existence has inevitably led him to packaging. In this latest group of works he has somehow got under the surface of his subject. Here, he has set about exposing the relations between the conceptual job of branding (and selling) and the quintessentially physical job of sealing that organise a ackage – the many resonances with the practice of the artist, and the strange life of the art commodity, need not be spelt out. Suffice to say they are poignant.
Meyer describes packaging as the complex architecture of containment and projection that both separates all goods from, and negotiates their way through, the world. In the group of works on show in WHITEOUT his continued use of two collage techniques that have established a dialogue within and between his works, (the one a traditional flat, dry technique, the second a more 3 dimensional technique whereby elements are cast into a well of glue), have been used to separate the role of projection in packaging and that of isolation, respectively.
In a set of cast collages, sealing components of vessels, the mundane but highly evolved language of tamper evident bands and vacuum sealed pressure indicators, cluster in configurations that talk collectively of the urgency of isolating the uncontaminated inside from the outside, the yet to be consumed from the consumed. While in a parallel set of dry collages the semantic surface of packaging is peeled and flattened, presenting the physical site of branding as occurring only on the very outside of the sealing envelope. In the tradition of Barthes, the exquisite superficiality of surface is laid bare.
In both, the superapplication of white sharpens our focus on the relations at stake: the strategic erasure that whiteout always represents, be it at the level of ‘correction fluid’, the signature whiteness of European modernism, or the whitewashing of infotainment, whiting out has the paradoxical/ironic corollary effect of revealing more. Meyer knows this well.
But talking to him one quickly discovers he sheds the analytic in favour of the poetic, referring instead to the whiteout of Midwestern winters of his adolescence, where a thick blanket of snow would erase the normal possibility of navigation and instead, in the raking winter light, reveal the previously hidden structure of the landscape.

November 2005