ART: Hazel Friedman
ASK artist John Meyer what his ultimate artistic ambition is and he will answer, unequivocally, “to paint like Velasquez”. As far as this painter of realist landscapes and portraits is concerned, in 300 years nobody has come closer to exuding true power through paint than the Spanish master, painter of the Rokeby Venus and the Portrait of Innocent X (according to Meyer the greatest portrait ever painted).
In short, Meyer’s reference points are located, not in contemporary sources nor even in the recent past, but in a time of baroque opulence when painting was painting, art was art and the twain always met in a formal embrace.
Not that Meyer is oblivious of the work of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or any other members of the neo-conceptual celeb set of the Eighties and Nineties. It`s just that he thinks their work belongs in the realm of idea, not art. For Meyer, message is subordinate to material, concept to craft. The painterly process reigns supreme. And on that level his exhibition is virtually flawless.
Divided into four components – landscape, portraits, group compositions and figure work – his exhibition provides a fascinating study on the recent evolution of his oeuvre, from the expansive, grandiloquent depictions of Ceres, Finsburg and Rousillon, and the starched representations of contemporary icons, to the quirky, grainier, grittier observations (for Meyer anyway) of the moment. The latter works, snippets from the bedroom (executed with an almost Freudian sense of realism), scenes from an orchestra pit and a local nightspot (hints of Manet and Degas abound), represent Meyer at his most liberated. As he articulates in an interview accompanying the catalogue of his exhibition, in these works he is driven by different imperatives to those informing his landscapes and portraits; “inventing ambiguous relationships and exploring emotions, in an unpredictable way”.
Conversely, his landscapes present an opulent mimesis that veers toward the romantic. They are generally unpopulated and dehistoricised – frozen in a utopian vision of never-never land, though their details are so convincingly “real”. One only has to compare them to the landscapes of another Meyer, Walter, to appreciate the difference between “I paint what I like” and “I paint what I think I should like”.
Through the corrupted light seeping through his empty edifices and abandoned cars, Walter Meyer’s work, although technically less resolved than his more polished and experienced counterpart, manages to convey a “reality” that simultaeously conforms to and subverts viewer expectations. It is not necessarily a conscious intention, but rather a matter of allowing a complex range of responses towards his subject matter to infiltrate the canvas. The result is often an uncomfortable one. Walter Meyer clearly does not follow gracefully in the footsteps of Volschenk, Pierneef and other landscape artists who used the landscape as a way to tap into Afrikanerdom’s romantic sense of identity. The best of his paintings speak not of a landscape where aarde (earth) rhymes unambiguously with genade (mercy) but rather of poignant desire and desolation.
Conversely, John Meyer is far more detached in observation and cheesecakey in execution. So are his portraits, even though he is clearly trying to get beneath the skins of his sitters. Produced from snapshots, they are rich in colour and textural differentiation. They are truly beautiful but they have an inescapably mannered quality about them – posed, positioned and preserved on canvas as though displayed – like Damien Hirst’s corpses, in a bottle of formaldehyde.
And it is not for nothing that Meyer regards Velasquez as one of the greatest artists. The power of the 17th century master lies not merely in his technical virtuosity but in his ability to suss out his subject and put a large chunk of himself, unselfconsciously, into his paintings. John Meyer need not aspire to painting like Velasquez. He should simply try to paint like John Meyer. The latter is an infinitely harder, but ultimately more rewarding process. And given Meyer’s undisputed ability, the outcome should be well worth the wait.