Adrien van Melle

Born in 1987, Adrien van Melle lives and works in Paris. He integrates the literature of fiction into the medium of painting, working with it as a material in its own right. In his artworks : writing, photography, installation and video are constantly intertwined.

Since 2017, he has been developing characters and underpinning their personalities while putting them through various adventures, considering them as extensions of himself. For the artist, writing is an infinite source of plastic possibilities, which he seizes upon to transform them into an artwork.

His characters Gabriel Mayer and Jules Wouters become human-scale installations through his written canvases. We explore their identity, their experience and their perception by visiting their bedrooms, with their furniture, accompanied by autobiographical images and texts, impregnated by daily life experiences. In contrast to an immediate comprehensibility, these installations are made up of significant, sometimes insignificant details, which the spectators can choose to grasp or ignore. The fictional narrative exhibited by Adrien van Melle’s work invites the reader-spectator to redefine his or her own relational and identity-related certitudes with the artist and his characters, as literature provides a valuable permeability between the visions and perceptions of individuals on the real.