Review by Mark Cousins
Press release for June 2000 one man show at the Beardsmore Gallery, London

The relation of the world to this series of work is oblique. It proceeds neither by representation nor by abstraction but by way of the more unlikely category of 'referring', yet what it refers to is not objects but other references. These references make up populations which are distributed in a taxonomic space. But for all this, the experience of the work is anything but abstract. The taxonomic elements, the lists of birds, the collaged elements of travel, are manifested as collections which gradually acquire their own spaces and which struggle into paint.

In the early 'Stay These Couriers' series the painted surfaces are seen to derive mechanically from a series of lines whose mapping then produces a complex geometry of spaces through colour, without losing the formal marks of translation. The subsequent 'collages' shown here begin to produce other spaces as if particular distributions of signs which become figures on a largely white ground, then become through the ground's complex contouring, particular sites - a signscape. These works bed the layer of references into a complex surface in which the reading of space is both spatially and conceptually ambiguous. By the end the work synthesises itself into three panels, 'Flag' paintings, which look like paintings, where perhaps, the references have migrated into painting.

Two points strike me. The work insists that the abstract diagrammatic representation of populations or of taxonomies is always in fact concrete. We remember this particular map or that particular table of elements. It is these that we remember when we also remember the objects which fall within their reference. Secondly, the flight of birds is inescapable as a condition of this series - the bird, not as an image or as an object, but almost as a point of view for the work. In fact the work could as well be hung 'horizontally' and read from above, a flightscape.

Review by Mary Ann Caws
Press release for October 2002 one man show at the Beardsmore Gallery, London

Writing, in April 2000, about Jonathan Meyer's work, Mark Cousins used the notions of signscape and then flightscape, from a bird's view of it. Agreeing with the imaginative movement from one to the other of those terms, and with Cousins’ description of Meyer's collages as creating their own space, and “struggling into paint”, I want to add my view now, from the summer of 2002, upon these and other of Meyer's works. 

Among my favourite works are Stampede and Ground, the tripartite Credit Slip and Equals, in the latter of which the shapes sneak through the two vertical division markers, giving a feeling at once of unease and freedom.  It would be hard to overlook his Flag series, especially for those of us who are converts (or from-the-beginning-enthusiasts) to Barnett Newman's strongly divided and strongly hued constructions.

Among recalls of American painters, Pack and Pack Trip are reminiscent of a few of Robert Motherwell's red and yellow forms in their single and triplet incarnations. In fact the notion of “recall” would seem crucial to Jonathan Meyer’s way of dealing with his working-out of things -- for it at once refers and refuses enclosure in such reference. I am thinking here, in particular, of the Jet Set series, a recent quadripartite work, with its four panels each a different colour and cohesive in their singularity, where a light bulb in the black panel sends you instantly to one in the yellow panel, and perhaps, to Guernica's celebrated light bulb, although nothing is fixed or determined in its reference. This kind of loose illumination might stand as iconic of Meyer's work in general. 

As for the genre of his recent work, there are actually two types of collage, the more traditional sort (Oyster, Stuck, Racket, the Pokemon series) and another more far-out sort, where various oddly-assorted elements (coins, staples, acupuncture needles, ball bearings, etc.) have been cast flat, suspended in acrylic medium, or, dissected pieces of a larger element (such diverse materials as copper, aluminium, rubber and plastic, in the case of Cable) are affixed to a support, over which liquid medium and ultimately paint is applied.

In these latter collages a further process fixes the ambiguous relationship between the cast elements and the medium they are suspended in, as the drying acrylic catalyses a green patination of the copper content (as in the earlier Flag series). Something about the unevenness of such pieces lends both surprise and character to them. That we don't know exactly where we are fits, however disturbingly, the temper of our times, whereas the semiotic references grow all the more complex in our minds.  One thing is sure, whatever the temper of viewer or artist, the more openly abundant the ways of experiencing all the various shapes, forms, and feelings offered, the more they can shape, form and feel the articulations in the different pieces of work.

Press Release
For November 2005 one man show at Level 4, Brussels

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 the quintessentially physical job of sealing that organise a package – the many resonances with the practice of the artist, and the strange life of the art commodity, need not be spelt out.

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.