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12/11/2004

Jin Meyerson

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris

Meyerson's interest in kinetic imagery - from football players squaring off at the line of scrimmage to ATVs leaping over sand dunes - is the primary impulse behind his aggressive manipulations of magazine photos. Rather than maintaining an expanding archive of snapshots or retreating into nostalgic scrapbooks and family albums, Meyerson flips through countless periodicals straight off the rack. The results, whether gleaned from Cycle World or Modern Bride, Sports Illustrated or Life Magazine's Year in Pictures, are up to the minute cultural artifacts with one thing in common: motion. The concussive force of two injection-molded helmets colliding or the suspended orbit of a soccer ball before it breaches a wall of players en route to the back of the net, might pique Meyerson's interest at the magazine store, but this is merely the first step in his systematic dismantling and amplification of the image. In Meyerson's unique brand of physics, motion is added to motion to depict, not just greater speed, but a network of clustered frequencies - both languid and frenetic - lying dormant within each image. While computer scrambling and randomizing is a means of revealing this hidden swarm logic, Meyerson goes much further in his painterly attacks by eradicating compositional centrality in favor of parabolic waves in blistering fuchsias and emerald greens. The estuaries of color here don't so much lap against their neighbor's shoals with liquid gentleness, as detonate like dispersed shrapnel. Although serial repetition has long been used to question an image's originality in the age of mechanical reproduction, Meyerson skirts this shopworn strategy by going straight to the source. Rather than repeat ad infinitum, he depletes, then rearranges, in one fell swoop. For Meyerson, then, the computer has a vampiric function, sucking the lifeblood out of, for instance, a yellow Hummer, not so much to create an undead disciple, but to reanimate the SUV's constituent parts - chrome hubs, knobby tires, rectilinear frame - so that, when completed, the final painting is not a mutant hybrid, a bastardized version or a parasitic leech, but a wholly different beast altogether. This is the definition of Post-Optical painting for Meyerson: incorporating source material, but never reliant upon it; starting from static reality framed on a glossy page and ending with an oily event marked by seismic vibrations. If frequency is a unit of measurement and pitch is what you hear, then Meyerson's paintings are what you see and feel. David Hunt

Emmanuel Perrotin
5/20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris
Open tuesday to saturday 11am to 7pm

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