Jean-Michel Meurice

The work

Tuscany 16
1990
200 x 200cm
Printing with acrylic paint on canvas without frame

The focus of this work is on the drawing and imprint of plant forms, leaves drawn or printed on the small colored rectangles of the ground, created by subtle horizontal and vertical stripes. The style is austere, reduced to the most basic shapes and lines.
The canvas has no frame; it was painted stretched out on the ground. The object of the painting is the painting itself, excluding everything that is not strictly the application of the brush or the tool impregnated with paint and the surface to which it is applied.

The artist

(Lille, 1938 – Paris, 2022)

It felt very close to the Support/Surface group, that is, paint and canvas on which it is applied: nothing more in an exploration of the emancipatory process by which painting moves away from its function of representation and illustration, “rejecting everything that is not the simple mechanism of painting.”
The surface, through the ruptures of shapes and colors that are created, prohibits mental projections or dreamlike wanderings on the part of the viewer. Painting is a work in itself, and it is in this field that it poses problems. It is neither a return to sources nor a search for original purity, but a simple exposition of the pictorial elements that constitute the pictorial act. Hence the neutrality of the works, their lack of lyricism and expressive depth.
He was also a prominent documentary filmmaker, inspirational figure, and director of the Franco-German TV channel Arte between 1986 and 1989.