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Site général : jeanclaudemeynard.com

So little is needed to unbalance our
much prized reality. Over the last century we
have learnt to accept that it is far less
straightforward than it seems: behind
the solid appearances provided by official
images (the supposed journalistic objectivity
which is more often than not a blind mask),
reality, in the likeness of that young girl in
the park, is not what you think it is.

In one photo in Antonioni’s film « Blowup »
anyone particularly observant can see that
the bucolic landscape possesses its mystery,
which is the inopportune but hidden presence
of a character who is perhaps only destiny’s
envoy. It is through such fragile indications that
we can be encouraged to investigate what is
actually happening behind the screen with its
projected images of supposed reality.
Wasn’t Alice shown into Wonderland by a rabbit
obsessed by his very tight schedule? In another
of Antonioni’s films it is a journalist, and thus
an intelligent man coolly observing world events,
who changes role and passes through the mirror.
 

All initiation rites show it, and psychoanalysis confirms it: we must lose ourselves before we
can find ourselves. We are living out our false personalities in a false reality and we can only
find our true identity in its true reality after transcending some dramatic and enlightening
experience: the transcendence of appearances. We can so easily get lost in this adventure
but it is only by risking it that we may eventually find ourselves.

I feel that Meynard’s painting develops the signs of certain transformation rites and his
strength lies in not giving us metaphoric images: his signs belong to our world and way of
life.(He belongs to the pinball generation (and remember that the American word for electric
billiards has produced the verb « flipper » in current French slang, meaning to « flip », to drift,
thus implying a distancing from material and social reality). This most astonishing gadget of
our consumer society has now become part of a rich mythology with, as its chief priest, the
well-known manufacturer Gottlieb (which means Love of God ») who has spread the rite so
universally.

In one of Meynard’s latest series of paintings, dedicated to games and gambling, he shows
a man playing on a pinball machine. The close-up style of this scene gives us such a
completely unexpected perspective that if ever we wanted to have this view ourselves
we would have to climb up onto a bar table. The hyper-realist effect provided by the
meticulous precision of the drawing is thus disturbed by the unusual visual angle.
This effect is even further altered by the luminous quality (and pinball is in fact a
game of lights, a satanic light-game, since the angel who deprived God of light was none
other than Lucifer) which helps the midnight blues merge into the glaucous sea-greens
and unreal twilight mauves.
 

Pop-art was only realism superficially. The
transfer brought about from the object itself to its image only ultimately showed the absence of the object in the image. Every image, however apparently realist it is, is a fantasy. It was originally in the pop-art field that Meynard demonstrated his draughtsman’s skills. He painted motor-bikes, also numerous bottles lined up behind the bar of a bistro, or even four paintings panoramically reconstructing a road in Butte Montmartre. That was in 1975.

Any supposed photographic precision in
painting becomes disturbing, and already
in the past the « trompe l’oeil «produced
a fascinating discomfort. Perhaps there
is an obsessional aspect in this extreme
precision, a way of filling the picture with
details in order to completely absorb the
gaze. There is probably also a desire to
prevent any of this reality from escaping,
as it can only be portrayed to the extent
that one is distancing oneself from it.
 

Meynard’s exhibition the following year was unambiguously called Loss of Identity and clearly
referred to that schizophre condition defined by the Petit Robert dictionary as retreat into
oneself, problems in adapting to exterior reality (it is a litote). In this series solitude, anxiety
and suicide were portrayed as consequences of a frenzied reality whose images were previously shown-in t
he Pop-art style (which in its own way is perhaps a frenzy). Meynard’s
style was well adapted to this development of his subject-matter, and his formerly glossy
composition (as with photos printed on gloss paper) managed to merge into a kind of pointilliste cloud
without losing its precision, as if the rather too striking evidence was only bearable when seen through a veil.

Meynard continued his dual drift in subject-matter and technique in his Thriller Series which
creates a story that does not actually reveal anything, but where all the clues put together
can lead the imagination along numerous paths. Antonioni, Patricia Highsmith, Hitchcock,
amongst others, are precise references without necessarily having to be understood in order
to experience a disturbing presence in these paintings. Their main strength lies in a solitary
melancholic anxiety combined with an impression that at any moment something unknown
is about to happen . A shadow, a reflection - they are there as signs of some menacing presence.
The « other » has just appeared.
 
 

Gambling is impossible without some anxiety, and the risk we run, apart from that of losing
our fortune, is of losing ourselves. Do you remember Renoir’s film based on Dostoévsky in
which the dignified Louis Jouvet emerged from the gambling rooms where he had lost absolutely everything?
He is already a dead man. One is never playing against another person.
One is playing against oneself, one’s double: In the same way we see a man playing on a
fruit-machine which is evidently a reflection of his own image. Similarly the pinball-player’s
face can be seen reflected three times along the shiny edge of his machine.

Firstly a certain emptiness in the world (because it is too full). Then loneliness. After that
comes the feeling of the other. And lastly, the double. Does this mean to say that the other
is the double and the double the other?/We should not try to define this ambiguity portrayed
by Meynard in his paintings, as their very basis consists precisely in that game of ambiguities.
The contents portrayed are less a reality than a certain fascination for this reality. A game of mirrors
dividing the image in two. A prism segmenting it. Reality ought always to be mentioned f It can be.
The efforts made in painting, if not to describe it at least to show it, conflict with the impossibility of taking
reality for its image (or vice versa). It can only ever be the expression of a drift from this reality, a dual
movement towards and outside it, towards and outside oneself. It is often through simple displacements,
enough to crack our veneer of pretentious certitudes, that the Angel of Mystery works. And, according to
Edgar Allan Poe. much admired by Meynard, it is this angel that always instigates scandal.

Gilles Plazy
Translated by Fiona Dunlop