One says a work of Meynard is distinguished by two signs: there is always, in appearance or transparency, a human figure, and the complexity is without limit and without smudging. For over three years, Jean Claude Maynard has been working on the human figure to achieve an icon of complexity: Babel.
Men conceived Babel as an limitless brick architecture to reach the sky. God, to thwart their plan, had created discord by inventing languages. Jean Claude Meynard diverts the myth and does of Babel a limitless architecture of men, inventing the signs of the same writing.
First declined in high glass slides and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Babel has taken the mythic shape of a human-sized tower for a year (1m80 high).
The work, the result of a repeated matrix of human silhouettes, is broken down into three different transparencies that create the appearance of a latticework.
As often with Jean-Claude Meynard, the whole gallery becomes the work, a fractal cube where visitors immerse themselves.
The Babel is made for travel: it is an architecture of reconciliation.
After China (Shenzhen) and Italy (Sermione) in 2008, the work is to istallée Riff Art Projects gallery in Paris from November 26 to January 30, 2010, and Turkey (Istanbul) in December and again in France in September 2010 at Villa Tamaris (Var).
Riff Art Projects – 48, rue Chapon 75008 Paris – Tel : +336 30 52 27 19 – www.galerieriffartprojects.com
The photographer François Perri presents and comments 50 portraits of children taken over 20 years during trips to Africa and Asia. A sensitive eye on the difficult situation of children in the south.