With [sculpture trail], Luxembourg Art Week brings together a selection of works and installations presented in open air. Their placement traces a route through the city, inviting encounters with art along the streets, in everyday journeys and places.
[sculpture trail] benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Jean-Claude Meynard
Babel Pyramide, 2008
Cut metal, 260 x 300 x 80 cm
Courtesy of JC Meynard Estate and Munhoven & Riff
Location
Grand Théâtre, 1, rond-point Robert Schuman
L-2525 Luxembourg
The Babel Pyramid: An Icon of Complexity
In the myth of Babel, people united by a single language build a tower to reach the heavens. The diversity of tongues then divides them, leaving the construction unfinished.
Jean-Claude Meynard turns this story on its head: his Babel is built not of stone, but of human beings. His “Matrix”, a human silhouette multiplied endlessly, becomes the raw material of a new kind of architecture.
Within the Pyramid, each silhouette is both an individual and a part of a greater whole. The repetition of figures creates a structure in which unity emerges from multiplicity, and each person contributes to the balance of the whole.
The Pyramid thus becomes a human Babel, a metaphor for a humanity that is complex, interdependent and forever under construction. Where the myth tells of separation, Meynard imagines an architecture founded on relationship: people are no longer the builders of Babel; they become Babel itself.
Biography
Jean-Claude Meynard was born in 1951. His works range from hyper-realism to fractal geometry and computer art. He is one of the signatories of the Fractalist Manifesto. His creations are focused on the exploration of the complexity of reality and the updating of the geometrical worlds which prefigured the visual founding of the 21st century.
The nucleus and referential geometrical figure of his works is the human silhouette.
Critics usually organize the works into 4 large cycles: IDENTITIES (1973-80), BODIES (1980-92), FRACTAL MAN (1992-2012) and METAMORPHOSES (2012 to present).
The succession of these 4 cycles, which structure the works, is like a fractal branch system in constant evolution, moving from one modus operandi to another – pictorial, sculptural, scenographic or digital creations – and from one formal representation to another, all in constant renewal.
By elaborating these new settings for Man within the complexity of reality, Meynard projects Man onto a new scale and reveals the imagination of tomorrow.
As the works appeared, critics noted iconic figures and the first of the "Identities", where Man moves about in exemplary sharpness in the fuzziness of existentialist enquiry, then the "Bodies", where human silhouettes appear and disappear in ceaseless renewal, then "Fractal Man", both rebus and puzzle, and today, the large cycle of "Metamorphoses", with a human identity deploying into new bodies.
The artist says, "Within the world's complexity, Man can only reformulate himself."
This pictorial reformulation runs throughout the artist's works, but from hyper-realism to fractal the eye can identify the project's permanence: "The aim is to look at the world in a non-finite way, or not definitively finite, to afford possibilities of composition and recomposition, therefore, of life."
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