The Lucerne artist Werner Meier (b. 1943) is surprising us with three new realistically painted series of pictures: patisseries, flowers and plotted plants, as well as so-called lucky charms. Werner Meier has had a presence as an artist in Central Switzerland since the 1960s, with a diverse body of work that has always been shaped by the individual circumstances of his life. After early experiments with objects, which attracted a great deal of attention, drawing and painting came to dominate his work. A representational view of the image remains a part of it, despite extended excursions into abstraction, a dominant feature that appears very strikingly in his latest series of works.

On the one hand the artist is fascinated by the composition of surfaces, not least in terms of the challenge represented by their transposition into painting. On the other hand, the new groups of works are based on a conceptual approach. Meier chooses to paint objects of seduction and desire, an objective substitute for immaterial states, for moods like happiness or contentment. The selection of motifs is consciously driven by conflicting qualities, but Werner Meier skilfully steers clear of making any value-judgments.

With a detached eye he paints a portrait of the objects in all their material appearance and then, showing them against a white grounded canvas and thus freeing them from their utilitarian context, places them effectively without commentary in an interim zone that knows neither space nor time. No exaggeration, no propaganda, no irony, no sarcasm, no moral. They may be beautiful, they may be kitsch, they may be rich, they may be cheap, they cheery, cheat, comfort, sober. Meier is painting the face of seducation. Its essence is – to use a term that Jean-Christophe Ammann coined for Meier’s art in 1974 – «gleich-gültig» (German for «equally valid» as well as «indifferent»), and judgement of the work is left up to us, the viewers.