Signs of Light

by Cynthia Penna

Entering a space in which works by Claudia Meyer are installed may become a complex and rich sensorial experience. One is immediately “enveloped” in an almost metaphysical aura and by a flow of energy in movement.
The impact is quite surprising. It is, above all, a matter of a “instinctive attraction” towards and within these signs that appear to evoke communication, or rather an archaic and unknown language.
It is the privilege of a chosen few to understand this language. But everyone can appreciate the hypnotic beauty of a light which illuminates the sign, and breaks vigorously into it.
The sign appears as a tangle of words, of lines, of waves that must be captured and grabbed.
Like the pictorial signs of primitive populations, like the “lines” of Nazca in Perù, and like the signs of the Aborigines in Australia, the one of Claudia Meyer reminds an archaic form of communication, but it is her own inescapable form of expression.
A continuous evolution of signs where the lines, the drawings follow one another, to be moved, confused and mixed with one another in an illusory and unreal desire for communication.
It is a matter of harmonic and dynamic handwriting, a new alphabet of the soul that bursts forth with a continuous flow of words that reminds us of music.
Like the “musicality” of Proust’s prose, formed of an incessant sequence of animated images that tend to resemble soundwaves more than written words, the musicality of Meyer’s signs conquers the viewer or the “listener”, embracing him or her in a sensorial crescendo that brings to mind Ravel.
A surge of pure energy, accentuated by the use of light which illuminates only some sections of the scene, condensing it and making the eye perceive only certain pivotal points.
Light is essential to the artist, as a conceptual element of the epiphany of a discovery.
The sign therefore travels along two tracks: a sign that is not illuminated, that as such represents words, discourses, communication with others, and that lives an own life of essential relations. And then another sign, which dialogues with light and serves the purpose of “illuminating” thought, facilitating the transmission of knowledge through a different, more immediate vision of the scene.
Light as immediate access to thought: light as transmission of thought. Or light as a direct approach to the flow of energy in movement that emerges from the support, striking the observer and hypnotizing him or her, carrying him or her away by that very same energy.
The whole composition of the work consists of an alternation of bright spaces and dark ones, or perhaps we should rather say “obscure” spaces; not unlike the rhythm of life, where we also experience a continuous duality between pleasure and pain, mystery and reality.
But if we observe the space of Meyer’s paintings closely, it is often divided into compartments or organized in a grid, so as to form a geometric graphic composition that incorporates the whole “narrative”. This construction seems to reflect a need, for the artist, to deliberately integrate the constructivist experience, which is closely linked to the artist’s Swiss origin.
The rigor of a certain Middle European approach makes her create a kind of “system” of successive squares which become the structural basis of the work. Meyer would never measure swords with the infinite space of “color field”: a kind of “painter’s agoraphobia” prevents her from doing so.
Even when Meyer superimposes apparently free forms, a close observation will always reveal a structural base, which is divided by horizontal or vertical lines, and that in any case features a systemic rhythm and arrangement. The same “system” that underlies the organization of Nature to which many of her works even seem to allude and which is a strong element of interest in her research. Some of the “signs” that she investigates, seem to remind small and unknown corpuscle of Nature flowing into the space.
And so Claudia Meyer’s work is all this: Energy that bursts forth, flows of energy in movement that interact with one another, forms that allude to unknown beings or bodies recoverable in Nature; a graphic sign that, in its turn, follows the energy that animates it, powers it and makes it fly.