Merny Wenz

A painterly nod to the ushering in of Modernism? Would it be too much to suggest the particular shades of green deployed in our latest flyingleaps street poster recall the background foliage in Édouard Manet’s famed 1863 work Déjeuner sur l’herbe? Probably, yes.

Okay. Let’s try this... Do you have a green room at home or at work? Does it have a secondary colour thematic, say black? And maybe an accent or ‘pop’ of blood red? Do you like artworks whose subject is meticulously annotated? Does it matter to you whether that annotation affords fuck all help as to what the picture is about? If the answer to the above is, “What?!” then flyingleaps latest collaboration with Merny may just be the answer to all your 2024 interior decor needs.

Merny is a Bristol based artist, illustrator and muralist who is not averse to making work calling out criminals. Our latest street poster titled Smooth Things Over (2024) arguably tackles what is at first sight a less pressing problem: what to do when things are uneven? It’s an issue that presents itself in all shapes and sizes. There’s times when we accidentally rip off a fingernail and here the wise advice is to clip above the cuticle line and file very gently.

Occasionally though a rough patch arises that requires more than a manicure tool. There’s the bumpy jagged grief born of dented mental health, or not having a pot to piss in. Patience, tact, understanding (and cash) can all help, a diplomatic smoothing, a metaphoric abrasion if you will, a rubbing down of problems until they feel not quite as rough as we first thought.

Then there’s the heavier duty work of giving a ‘good scuffing’ to, say, the smirk on Piers Morgan’s face (for which you may need the tool specifically featured in Wernz’s new work). And taking us up a further notch regarding problems, there’s bombing a people and their land, razing whole cities and communities to the ground, where the so-called flattening or ‘dismantling’ should more properly be called out as war crimes and genocide.

Because of their contribution to the Nazi war machine Bosch had fifty percent of its works and offices flattened during WWII. After the war Bosch got going again amid the factory ruins by manufacturing cooking pots out of steel helmets. Employees could use these items themselves or trade them for other essentials. And post-war Bosch started making spark plugs for the Allies’ military vehicles, so all was soon forgiven. Well, that is until the company was implicated in using Uyghur Muslim slave labour in their manufacturing chain. The Chinese State, of course, has its own strategy of steamrollering Uyghur resistance in their so called ‘re-education camps’, designed to strip people of their personal, ethnic and religious ‘rough edges’.

So, as his vivid and multi-media website amply attests, there’s a lot more to Merny’s work than colourful wit and mordant irony. He’s clearly keen to tell truths but ‘at a slant.’ Other artworks annotate using letters on his signature black pin sticks pointing to various pictorial elements but with Smooth Things Over we have numbers. In general, annotation is an important component of careful ‘reading’, it improves comprehension, it interprets and comments, annotations reflect engagement. But what if – as is the case with Merny’s annotated artworks – there’s no legend so we’re unable to decode the information?

Perhaps what’s happening is we’re being invited to make up our own minds about the subject at hand, to look and think a bit harder? If that’s the case, you can’t help but notice Merny has omitted the number six? A number that connotes perfection (see Pythagoras and Saint Augustine); it’s a sign of good fortune (being the highest pip on a six-sided die); six is also the symbol of Venus, goddess of love... So, in Merny’s poster proposal to solve all our problems – personal, local, or global – blithely smoothing them over minus ideals of ‘good fortune, perfection, love’ could have us barrelling towards disaster. Maybe he’s onto something.