Catherine MELIN
Écho
Studio - Galerie Isabelle Gounod
19.05 - 09.06.2018
If Catherine Melin uses photography for many years as a tool for capturing spaces and atmospheres, serving to feed her work of drawing, installation and sculpture, most of these images only retain the status of autonomous documents.
Since 2017, Catherine Melin has been developing work that, through different processes, seeks precisely to divert the original nature of this corpus of images and to play with the instability of their status.
It was during her residency at the Bel Ordinaire, in Pau, that she created her first series of works in graphite powder: the images are exposed and then transferred onto paper with a transparent base, then revealed by the application and dispersion of the graphite powder, allowing the subject to rise to the surface like a developer.
Catherine Melin gives them a new, discreet and deaf presence through her treatment in grey value. It is not a question of subjugating the eye, quite the contrary. The interest here lies in the time required for the viewer to reveal and understand these ambiguous images, which are as much drawing as photography.
"To the narcissistic confrontation with drawing, Catherine Melin prefers the presence in the world and the work of art which makes exist, between the invisible and the real, these intermediaries that are the images ; not those that must be admired but those that reveal what merits to be admired."
Monique Larouture, for the BO / Revue du Bel Ordinaire, 2018
