HARDING MEYER
TEXTS (selection)
MALEREI (PAINTING)
Jarmuschek + Partner | October 30- December 11, 2010
With a group of new portraits, Harding Meyer continues to analyse the artistic principles of his portrait painting and extends his range. Alongside the familiar dreamlike beauty and facial distortion, another aspect becomes apparent.
With a format that is dimensionally effective, Harding Meyer's protagonists look at us in a magical way and the photo realism of their presence is formidable. Often worked and reworked over months and in multiple layers of paint, the larger than life aspect of the portraits affords true attention to detail. Disregarding the role of traditional portraits, Harding Meyer's faces do not reveal the essence of the individual. Observers are certainly required to focus their gaze and enter into a dialogue with Meyer's painted figures, yet these reveal neither their inner nor outer being. Meyer's works do not primarily intend to comprehend the nature of the person portrayed. They are more like set piece perspectives into the characters and faces of an anonymous flood of images. By decontextualising them in virtuoso style, the artist snatches these perspectives from their mass media origins and furnishes them with a new intensity.
Contrary to current methods of digital enhancement and retouching, the skin surface of Meyer's protagonists is not smoothed out, but instead is torn up and fragmented. At the same time, diverse perspectives of view and form converge in a picture and thus "deform" the depicted faces. In spite of, or even because of artistic intervention, the effect of an individual expression is intensified in the faces portrayed. However, the artist's specific paint and pallet knife technique, by which he fragments the surface of the painting, also suggests that the focus for him is not the subject but rather a conflict which has been released into the painting.