Where other artists establish by writing, Jean-Luc Meyssonnier chose the photographic image. Taken by the passion for this medium, he attended in 1975 the classes of the School of Photography in Lyon and developed quickly his own personal style. One year later, he returned to live in Largentière his home town. One has a presentiment of his childhood marked by an introverted sensitivity which kept dimming his vision of the real life and which enabled him to develop this personality “impressed” of reality and dream. From 1980 to 1985, it assisted the sculptor and photographer Michel Sima also living in the Ardèche. This was a determining meeting and a help to his career, since Meyssonnier became the appointed printer of Sima's photographic fund, including negatives of his work with Picasso, Picabia, Giacommetti and all the artists of the "Ecole de Paris"..
Using of black and white and always proceeding by series, his photographic work crystallises a graphic work -made of flowers or landscapes, still lifes, research for abstract compositions and intimate subjects like faces - which sometimes, through the saturation of the image, hides so many things and exposes so many others. His inventory also nurtures on some simple elements of a landscape always recurring: the mountain, the snow, the stone, the trees, the water. From his work on the mineral and vegetable, the issue is not that of the beauty of a landscape. It is oriented towards content and vision: its truths, its illusions and prodigies. His eye absorbs what is kept silent, faults, failures, omissions, blanks... unexpected areas. He recognizes in them some foreboding that whisper the language of desire, the strangeness, the imprints of the body or a world populated by roaming souls where lights and shadows switch together.
For almost two decades, his work, has been the topic of successful personal exhibitions in Paris, Lyon, Bourges and Switzerland. He also took part in numerous collective ones, in Switzerland (Lausanne, Bienne) as in France (Annecy, Lyon, Le Mans). In the meantime Jean-Luc Meyssonnier was invited to collaborate to the making of art books and catalogues for several artist: François Burland, Jules Desbois, Gérard Lattier and more recently Michel Sima.
Hélèna KOVACS