“What does it mean to meet a stranger - in particular, to meet a man?
To really meet him? Is it possible that for just one moment, even though you have just met, you can see him as he really is? Ok, so it may be just for one moment, but maybe for that one moment you see him in all his beauty and singularity;
see, in his face and body, his life.
We know they do exist, these moments - that's why so many of us hunt for them, again and again and again. But how can they ever be fixed, or captured, in a way that doesn't betray them? What Georg Meyer-Wiel is doing in this series of drawings is presenting his search for an answer to that question.
A never-ending, constantly updated work in progress, these drawings are intensely personal, executed with graphic haste in the heat of the moment - sometimes, in the most heated of all moments; they are as urgent, as graphic, as the love-making they implicitly celebrate. They present, in public, a private truth. Seen one by one, they offer us brief encounters of a very masculine immediacy, finding tenderness in the raunchiest of beauties; seen as a series, they initiate a charged conversation with the viewer. They offer a dramatic space in which we can think (and feel) our way through what they really mean to us, these strange and potent meetings with strangers that map out all our lives.”
Neil Bartlett. Author, Director
Watercolor, ink and mixed media on paper, London 2005 - 14.