“THERE IS NO SPOON”

Brussels, October 2023

There are quests that do not require travel. Mythologies told only to the self, odysseys turned inward.
In his collection of poetry This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra, the musician and poet, who considered himself as coming from the cosmos, extends an invitation to us: “In some far off place, many light years in space, I’ll wait for you. Where human feet have never trod, where human eyes have never seen. I’ll build a world of abstract dreams and wait for you.”
Julien Meert also invites us into a singular region populated by painted worlds. Where are we when we are not in ourselves? When we think, dream, and sleep? What is that “reality”? Of these multiple identities which constitute us, this self-distancing can happen in various ways, to varying degrees: a separation of thoughts, the whole body or a part, feelings, senses... we feel as though we are watching ourselves, taking on the dual role of observer and actor.
This is one of the characteristics of Julien Meert’s work. The distancing – from oneself, from the world, from reality – allows the possibility of other imaginary worlds to arise. An infinity of layers inhabited by disparate pictorial characters that we recognize very clearly but never really know.

It is a reminiscence in the conceptual sense: according to a metaphysical philosophy of knowledge, the soul does not learn anything, it remembers. The acquisition of knowledge must then begin with a recognition.

And we recognize Julien Meert. The blue backgrounds characteristic of his vertical self-portraits have given way to horizontal ones: self-flowerpots-volcanoes-pyramids-alleys-borders-groves, self-butts-arms, self-cat kisses, self-farts, self-night birds, self-storms-intestines-phylacteries, self-planet-erasures, self-mummies, self-co-mets, self-man-woman-siren-seahorses.

The philosophical heritage of ancient Greece points to a conceptual and symbolic separation between horizontality and verticality. By switching formats in Planetarium, the artist does not invite us into the human sphere (vertical), but into the metaphysical sphere, those of the Gods and the Cosmos (horizontal) [2]. Two distinct iconographic wills coexist, acting in parallel in this scenographic and theatrical pictorial space, a zone in which tangible, material, and metaphysical realities can exist together.

A world where physical and ethereal bodies cohabitate. A back and forth between the mental space of schemas and the physical space of words and language.

In the universe of video games, in the arcade or online, the surveying architectures indicate a thought-passage. In the same way, in what we call “the real”, we pass continuously, from one ground to another, from a space to the other, from a reality to a role-playing game, social, political, however we may identify ourselves.

Julien Meert’s blue and starry skies strewn with comets and meteors come to life as characters in their own right, just as much as his self-portrait variations or the characters from the cosmos converse in his paintings, drawings, and animations. Planetarium is a pictorial adventure, a static journey through a landscape of thought.

[1] The Matrix

[2] Thomas Morard, Horizontalité et verticalité. Le bandeau humain et le bandeau divin chez le Peintre de Darius.