Adrien van Melle works fiction as a material in its own right, intertwining writing, photography, installation and video.
Since 2017, he creates and evolves characters thought as an extension of himself, like a tree of plastic possibilities that the artist does not wish to abandon or exclude. He then seizes them entirely in order to transform them into works of art and maintain their nature in the making.
Through their biography, their intimacy and their sensitivity, his characters Gabriel Mayer and Jules Wouters become installations on a human scale, notably in the works Reproduction of Gabriel Mayer's bedroom and Reproduction of Jules Wouters' bedrooms. We explore their identity, their experiences and their perception by visiting their bedrooms, with their banal furniture, accompanied by images and autobiographical texts, imbued with everyday life. These installations are made up of many indexical, sometimes insignificant details that the viewer can choose to grasp or ignore.
The latter thus plays a fundamentally active role by elaborating a new facet of the fiction proposed from the narrative fragments given to be seen and read. This proves all the more convincing in his work Séance (2017), where black images follow one another, whose format echoes the cinema screens, in the centre of which are read, in white characters, short texts halfway between narrative poetry and micro-fiction. The resulting mental projections then assert themselves as so many possible readings and images of reality.
The fictional narrative approached through the prism of multiplied subjectivities invites a constant redefinition of relational and identity certainties, by giving rise to a precious permeability between the visions and perceptions of individuals brought to reality.
Text by Licia Demuro for the 64th Salon de Montrouge