For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Derouillon, Margaux Meyer presents a series of new paintings at Hôtel Cromot du Bourg.
Only by appointment
Margaux Meyer (born in 1998 in Suresnes) graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022, from Tim Eitel’s studio.
Recent exhibitions: ‘’Everybody flies’’ (solo), DS Galerie, Paris (2023); ‘’Souvent le soleil plonge’’ (solo), POCTB, Orléans (2023); ‘’Sous la régulation du coeur’’ (solo), Galerie Chloé Salgado, Paris (2023); ‘’APT.237 ‘’, 3537, Paris (2023); ‘’LONG MEYER MINIERO PIARD’’, Cabinet Studiolo, Milan (2023); ‘’Something in the air’’, POUSH, Clichy (2022).
“Colour, like a hormone, acts across, embarrasses, seduces. It stimulates the juicy interval in which emotion and sentiment twist.” Lisa Robertson*
When I saw the first blues appear on Margaux Meyer’s canvases, I was immediately drawn in. They plunged me into a reverie from which I was torn almost immediately. This melancholy blue was reminiscent of Derek Jarman’s sublime Blue, of rain, of the azure sky, of Maggie Nelson’s fragments of Bluets poured out like tears, of the ocean, of Frida Kahlo’s blue house, of the Virgin’s cloak, of Andy Warhol’s erotic Blue Movie, to Francis Bacon’s gushing waters...
For Margaux Meyer, as for Maggie Nelson, blue is a “spell”, a state of mind more than just a color. It summons us, charms us, appeals to our visceral sensations. Meyer’s painting is deeply embodied, born from the guts and reaching out to the viewer’s body. The body is always at the origin of the compositions, as a pretext to let us plunge into the blue flesh of the painting.
The blues carried me along with them. Sliding, quickly, more slowly, then faster and faster. Sliding along surfaces, between layers, thicknesses and glazes. “Then we fall”.
The rhythm is cut.
Meyer’s work is also a game of ruptures. Knowing when to interrupt her gesture, making us fall back with the brush. The very title of the exhibition initiates a rhythm of rupture, that of James Joyce’s already jerky words in Finnegans Wake:
“It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes.”.
The series follows the cycle of a pendulum between feeling-color and arrhythmic movement. Her compositions have skeletons made of knots, points of tension and release, and render subtle plays of light and dissonance on the canvas through straightforward gestures.
Meyer also breaks the cycle of blue, which in fact only exists in relation to browns, pinks and greens. After a moment spent in this humid interval, our eyes distinguish the nuances and details of powerful strokes, the subtlety of glazes, the rhymes between canvases. The cut is matched by repetition between titles and between canvases, which often exist as imperfect twins. Meyer’s series exhausts the gesture, allowing it to highlight the forces of composition and color intention. Like so many declensions of falling, the paintings remind us of the frequent use of the verb “to fall” to describe our emotions. The influence of the blue hormone gradually dissipates in our bodies. It marks us with a memory that will be revived the next time we encounter color - the next time we fall.
Marion Coindeau
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*Lisa Robertson, “How to Colour”, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Astoria OR Clear Cut Press, 2003, p.149
© Grégory Copitet
