Adrien van Melle

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

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

His characters, Gabriel Mayer and Jules Wouters, become human-scale installations in his written canvases. We explore their identities, experiences and perceptions by visiting their bedrooms, with their banal furnishings, accompanied by autobiographical images and texts steeped in everyday life. In contrast to immediate legibility, these installations are made up of numerous significant, sometimes trivial details, which viewers 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 certainties of relationship and identity with the artist and his characters, insofar as literature, now transfuged, creates a precious permeability between the visions and perceptions of individuals brought to bear on reality.