An exhibition of works by Lukas Meir, recipient of the 2023 ‘Francis Bacon MB ArtFoundation scholarship’, presented at the Villa Arson, Nice

In September 2023, Lukas Meir received the fourth scholarship awarded by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation to a young artist who has graduated from the Villa Arson with a National University Diploma in Artistic Expression, obtained by virtue of practice and production in the field of painting or drawing. As both a painter and a sculptor, Lukas Meir's work depicts scenes from everyday life, using a visual language that evokes Renaissance religious painting.

His exhibition ‘The Anointing’ is on show at the Villa Arson until 2 February 2025. What has become of holidays in the age of late capitalism? This is the question that drives Lukas Meir's pictorial and sculptural work, as he observes beaches crowded with bodies, veritable temples in which this strange, profane, yet, in the artist’s words, ‘almost religious’ ritual seems to take place. A ritual that ‘promises redemption from earthly suffering’, notably manifested in the joyous acceptance of an injury: sunburn. Lukas Meir sees it as an act of faith, the self-punishment of a martyred society ‘ready to die for its belief in eternal growth’. In the ironic and deliberately exaggerated use of this metaphor, a fundamental role is played by sunscreen: an attempt at protection and healing, an ‘anointing of SPF 50’. This sunscreen appears on the damaged skin of the bathers in a grotesque and disturbing way: sometimes applied like a clown's make-up, at other times smeared on until it completely covers their faces, the coarseness of the white patches stands in stark contrast to the artist's otherwise realist and highly refined brushwork, capable of referencing some of the great masters of the past while simultaneously desacralising them.