PUBLICATIONS

Why undo or remake of the world? This question latently animates any artistic creation, and making artworks rarely used this question as a theme of their production. It’s in this context that I place Mélina Bismuth’s paintings- a work awaiting the total reconstitution of the visible world.
 
Each of her creations takes as material a myriad of photographs attached to each other. They are proof that her imaginary buildings come from reality and that only their methodical assortment is an invention. They represent various objects (fabrics, scaffolding, reflections – to name just a few) which, linked together by an art of assembly, construct facades, planets, floating shapes or optical distortions.

Mélina Bismuth’s world is thus born thanks to the combination of these photographed elements, multiplied to the point of erecting unrealistic spaces, foreign to our vision accustomed to what appears to us to be reality. An admirable and strange world which could pass for abstract if we did not recognize the eye of photography in her creation.

The assembly technique is laborious because in the juxtaposition of the photographs the shaping of the effects of relief and depth is decided, mainly through the differentiation of colors. Furthermore, the ordering of the graphics requires very careful work since they play a narrative role in these tables. Thus, the sidereal atmosphere that reigns in the painting "Lo Profundo es el Aire" is produced by the graphic interweaving of the green lines of a floating city and the gray-beige background slabs which are reminiscent of a gigantic aerolite. In this example, the title assigned to the final image only names one aspect of the overall construction which itself remains nameless and not without reason. Isn’t one of the paintings called "Beyond Words" ? Isn’t a series of three entitled "Not Here", thus designating an “elsewhere” as much as the absence of an explanatory title?

We should therefore not expect the titles to tell us into which world we are immersing the paintings. They demonstrate a cultivated impertinence: let's not look for the shape of a pin-up in the painting "Belle de Nuit", or the illustration of a famous song in "Sodade". All these nominations refuse to provide an explanation of art and prefer to place us face to face with the unspeakable. However, they occupy an essential place for the understanding of the painting by inviting the viewer to enter directly into a spirit of discrepancy which is at the center of each of the works.

Reading a painting by Mélina Bismuth is, in fact, a two-dimensional exercise: firstly, an overview of the extreme abstraction which seduces with the beauty of the colors and a rigorous structure, then an analytical view and particularized details which reveal the content of the painting: a plurality of concrete images. All the originality of the work lies in this pairing of realism and abstraction through which the artist works to undo and remake the world.


Introduction to the "Generem" exhibition, July 2024, Arles