Catherine Melin’s oeuvre is developed from and with urban objects, location photographs, filmed captures of actions seen in the public place or occasionally orchestrated by the artist, wall drawings, and drawings on paper. All these elements are chosen, assembled and executed to create a work and together turn into a proposition in the form of an exhibition. The modular exhibition, which can be modulated, is a state of research, a Fulcrum.
Through these different forms, there is a latent memory of gestures (those of the artist drawing and those of workers executing works), movements (those of dancers, sportsmen and -women and children activating urban structures) and journeys–the artist’s, from Russia to China, encountering different, displaced spaces and customs.
Issuing from this proposition are lines (those of drawing, those of structures, and those of paths proposed by the artist) and voids which formulate so many possible accepted meanings and appreciations of the work.
And what stands out in this oeuvre as a whole is an essential poetry which this book tries to recreate for the reader, and which Jean-Christophe Bailly identifies, in the following excerpt and at other moments in his essay: “Needless to say, and the word probably had to be used here, I am thinking of the spatial dream which came with Constructivism, of the threads which Tatlin or, still more precisely here, the Sternberg brothers drew in space. Almost a century has elapsed, but the hold and the challenge are the same: like alert children, Catherine Melin’s structures reflect a lesson of freedom which, let us not forget, we have in the meantime done everything to hide or destroy.”
Cédric Loire rounds off the itinerary proposed in this book, from China to Russia, with a general and referenced essay on Catherine Melin’s work, complete with its sources and extensions.
Authors : Jean-Christophe Bailly, Cédric Loire
Technical details
: 22 x 28 cm, 144 pages, paperback.
Languages : French, English.
Published on february 2014.
Isbn : 978-2-35864-051-0.
Public price : 28€
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