JONATHAN MEYER

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 moving to London to work as an architect, and having had several small projects built, between the years 1992 and 1994 he was assistant to the landscape 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, history, 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. In November 2005 he had a solo show entitled WHITEOUT at Level 4 in Brussels. His work included in private and corporate collections in the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, USA and Australia.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT(S):

2000

I have always found beauty in attempts to organise complex information, attempts that by definition are bound to fail. A map is an elaboration of facts about a landscape and is often an elegant document, but it will always remain only an elaboration. This is not to say that it is not useful, but eventually it will have to compromise, to tell tall tales and half truths. When faced with the actual complexity and subtlety that surrounds us, the geographer draws boundaries where others see none, as do the taxonomist and the painter.

We must always negotiate with information and the fruits of these negotiations will be errors, faults, surprises, concessions, happy coincidences, omissions and many ‘grey’ areas. These are the fruits that will continue to fuel my work.

2002

I tend to think of works in progress as populations in a state of flux. The work I do helps them to achieve some kind of stasis, a finished work fixing them in a certain configuration. These populations are usually made up of scraps, half facts, non sequiturs, numbers, bits: the flotsam and jetsam of lives lived. Our living is the glue that holds these crowds together; we cannot escape taxonomy.

Yet when we set out to apply taxonomy, to somehow order and make sense of things, we are often left in a very grey area. I believe that things themselves hold truths, but when they are subjected to exterior forces these truths can easily be obscured or stretched into new entities. In a sense, it is my intention to let this happen. Right now I am happy to be caught between the act of looking and the act of telling.

2004

It is probably safe to say that glue is central to my work. I use glue to stick things down, but I also use it to stop a thing from doing what it was doing before it became stuck down.

Things stuck down are changed in an almost alchemical sense: They are given a completely new context, reframed, and as if suspended in amber become something else, developing new identities which in turn can develop relationships with other things. These new sets of relationships become the stuff of the paintings. But just as an exhibit of butterflies pinned to a velvet covered panel is no longer really about the life of a creature and its fluttering path between flowers, it also cannot ever completely exclude that (previous) life.

Back to glue, my work roughly divides into two categories. Both are collage but they differ in their respective ratios between the ‘colle’ and the ‘collé’, the glue and the things being stuck. The “casts” are collage where the recipe has gone awry. There is a surfeit of glue and the ‘collés’ find themselves not simply fixed but immersed in it, set in solidified space. I like this process because there is much more opportunity for things to “go wrong”.

After the collage has been stuck, or the cast set, the picture is then selectively masked by layers or veils of paint (which is itself nothing but pigment suspended in glue) to emphasize or obscure various of the new relationships between its inhabitants, prompting or discouraging conversation as the case may be. At this point, I can recede and leave them to it.