Adrien van MELLE

Born in 1987, Adrien van Melle lives and works in Paris. He integrates literary fiction into the pictorial medium, treating it as a material in its own right. His work constantly combines writing, photography, installation and video.

Since 2017, he has been developing characters and elaborating on their personalities while having them experience 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 works of art.

His characters Gabriel Mayer and Jules Wouters thus become, through his written canvases, human-scale installations. We explore their identity, their experiences and their perception by visiting their bedrooms, with their banal furniture, accompanied by autobiographical images and texts, imbued with daily life. Eschewing immediate legibility, these installations are composed of numerous significant, sometimes innocuous, details that viewers can choose to grasp or ignore. The fictional narrative exhibited by Adrien van Melle's work invites the reader-viewer to redefine their own relational and identity certainties with the artist and his characters, insofar as literature, having become a defector, here elicits a precious permeability between the visions and perceptions of individuals brought to bear on reality.