Galerie DUMONTEIL Shanghai opens the solo exhibition “METAMORPHOSES - Fractal Bestiary” of French artist Jean-Claude Meynard, one of the pillar founders of Fractal Art. For his first exhibition in China, Meynard created a series of fractal works around the theme of animal exclusively for Galerie DUMONTEIL.

The series consists of animal figures composed of a single matrix: human silhouette. Playing the principles of fractal geometry, Meynard infinitely multiplies this figure at different scales to compose the figure of the animal. Thus, the animal is no longer an exact animal. It is a man, or rather a man in progress.

Considered as the heir of Italian Futurism and Cubism, Fractal Art follows the same approach of mathematical artwork, through which the forms are deconstructed to become figurative and to create reality. It is one of the first artistic movements to claim a new relation between art and science, with a visual layout of the complexity and the infinity. The animal figures in Meynard’s fractal bestiary are from a chaos cleverly organised by the artist to break the initial order - the conventional order of the living, the great separation: man, animal, and to show life as an infinite algorithm, immense fractal composed of flux and of arborescence, from where flows at times an “identifiable figure” but soon escapes to an another metamorphoses. Though these works, Meynard shows the passage of life, from one state to another, within the moving, hesitant, and dancing limits of life. This mixture of territories, the abolition of borders, requires a new view: At what moment does the animal begin and at what moment does the man end? By recomposing and reprogramming the living, Meynard proposes a new mythology.