Fabien Merelle

Cela fait longtemps que l'habitude est prise. De loin en loin, Fabien Mérelle nous livre sa vision du monde, une interprétation du monde des grands qui souvent relèverait du cauchemar plus que du rêve, même si son dessin, toujours précis et fouillé, semble de nature à apporter la paix. Depuis peu, le personnage que nous voyons agir n'est plus seul. Il ne se débat plus au milieu des éléments, n'est plus continuellement aux prises avec des obstacles démesurés. Non, tel Nils Holgersson désormais, il vole avec les oies sauvages. C’est aussi que la famille s’est agrandie et il nous est précieux de voir ce personnage peu à peu inscrire les événements mythiques sur la page, sans démêler le vrai du faux, car, de tout cet univers, ce qui nous parle le plus directement est justement ce qui a trait à l’enfance. Peu importe alors que cette enfance soit l’actuelle, quand l’artiste la contemple de son œil d’adulte et de père, ou qu’elle soit passée, métamorphosée et recomposée par ce que nous appelons l’imagination. C’est un grand jeu qui s’ouvre devant nous, un jeu sérieux où, parfois, au sommet d’un arbre, le double de l’artiste guette ce qui vient au loin. Il ne se détourne pas facilement de sa position de guetteur, lui qui est toujours en alerte, récapitulant dans une tête qui n’arrête pas de tourner – mais qui tourne rond en dépit des obstacles figurés – les mille accidents que lui promet son destin de Sisyphe. Un jour l’arbre s’est déraciné et nous l’avons vu au sol, ce n’était déjà plus un arbre, mais l’artiste lui-même sortant du tronc, les jambes encore gainées d’écorce, prolongées par des racines. L’extraction avait dû être difficile… à moins que nous aussi ayons rêvé.

Nous sommes impatients de connaître la suite de l’histoire – comment dire ? Les suites plutôt, car l’histoire n’est pas une, elle est faite de mille petits faits, certains fantastiques et d’autres très réels, qu’un cerveau unique réunit – et encore pas à tout moment. Nous aussi, comme lui, nous sommes plusieurs à nous inquiéter de l’infini récit qu’il a la bonté de nous livrer, lentement, au rythme de la main, à mesure qu’une exposition chasse l’autre et rend ainsi notre souvenir plus diffus, plus cotonneux (quand le trait, lui, est précis, tout juste ombré par le lavis). En lui se rassemble un grand nombre ; et de notre côté, avant tout, nous sommes deux à le voir… Quand, entre nous, nous parlons de Fabien Mérelle, il arrive que la figure que nous évoquons se transforme à nouveau en son double au point de ne plus savoir de quel Fabien nous parlons. Comment vit-il ce moi multiple ? Sans doute aussi simplement qu’il voit ce qu’il dessine – alors que le passage au trait et à la couleur ne sont pas pour lui chose aisée. On rêve et on se voit flotter en l’air ou marcher sur d’interminables rochers, ou protéger sa famille d’un danger qui guette, ou préparer une sortie en mer quand celle-ci est calme et que le ciel est au beau fixe. Le dessin sert à fixer. Pas seulement une impression, comme l’histoire de l’art nous l’enseigne ; non, plutôt un motif, une injonction soudaine à se projeter là ou là. Il en va du devenir de ces dessins – et parfois de la forme sculptée qui les accompagne – comme de celui de nos rêves : si on les note, ils demeurent, mais à peine sont-ils notés qu’ils ont perdu la matrice qui les mettait en branle ; ce qui s’animait s’immobilise.

Alors, pour se remettre en mouvement, il n’y a qu’une chose à faire… dessiner, rêver à nouveau.

Je crois que cette aventure va nous emmener tous de plus en plus loin, et que, semblables au garçon du conte guidé par les oiseaux – à moins que nous ne soyons oiseaux nous-mêmes – nous allons peu à peu découvrir de nouvelles terres, de nouveaux cieux sans lesquels nous avions vécu jusqu’ici et qu’il nous sera impossible désormais d’ignorer. La parenté avec le processus du rêve se verrait là, peut-être : cette image fugace, qu’elle soit tableau ou bien séquence, quasi cinématographique, nous échappe sans cesse. L’habitude prise de les noter n’annule pas la motilité des rêves, car en les fixant comme sur un support sensible, nous n’arrêtons pas la série : nous en générons une nouvelle, une ou plusieurs. De chaque nouveau dessin découle une longue suite de situations que le premier a provoquée. Et nous suivons, avec l’artiste. C’est lui qui nous guide, de sa vigie faite oiseau. Frère Fabien, que vois-tu donc ? À nous d’attendre désormais que l’horizon s’ouvre – et nous verrons. Et ce que nous voyons est beau, de cela nous sommes sûrs, avant de l’avoir vu.

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Day Flight François Michaud Curator at the musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris The habit has been there for a long time. Every now and then, Fabien Mérelle hands us his view of the world, an interpretation of the world of grown-ups that often takes more from the realm of nightmares than from dreams, even if his drawings, always very precise and groomed, seem to bring peace naturally. Recently, the character that we see acting ceased to be alone. He no longer battles the elements, nor does he constant struggle with enormous obstacles anymore.

No, like Nils Holgersson from now on, he flies with the wild geese. There is also the fact that his family has expanded, and it is with profound pleasure that we see him committing mythical events to paper, without disentangling true from false, for what speaks most directly to us is exactly everything related with childhood. Little does it matter, then, whether it is today’s childhood viewed through the artist’s adult and paternal eyes, or a childhood from the past, transformed and recomposed by what we call imagination. So a grand game unfolds before us, a serious game where, sometimes, from the tip of a tree, the artist’s double tracks what comes from afar. He does not lightly turn away from his position as a lookout, he is always alert, recapitulating in his ever-turning head—but which still turns quite well in spite of the imaginary obstacles—the thousand accidents kept in store for him by his Sisyphus destiny. One day, the tree uprooted itself and we saw it lying on the ground; it was no longer a tree, but the artist himself emerging from the trunk, his legs, still sheathed with bark, extended like roots. The extraction must have been difficult … unless we too were dreaming.

We cannot wait to know the rest of the story or rather — how to say?— the ‘rests’, for there is not one single story; it is made up of a thousand small facts, some of them fantastical and some very real, which a unique brain brings together, and not even at every moment. We too, like him, are several, and we are anxious to know the never-ending tale he is kind enough to regale us with, slowly, at hand speed, as one exhibition chases the previous one away, thus blurring our memory, rendering it more fluffy (whereas strokes are precise, just slightly shaded by wash).

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In him a great many come together, while we are, above all, two watching him ... When we talk amongst ourselves about Fabien Mérelle, sometimes the figure we evoke turns into his double again to a point where we no longer know which Fabien we are talking about. How does he experience this multiple self? Undoubtedly in as simple a way as where he sees what he draws but finds it difficult to convey it with a stroke or colour. We dream and we see ourselves floating in the air, walking endlessly on rocks, protecting our family from lurking danger, or preparing a trip out to sea when the water is calm and the sky is set on blue. Drawing serves to set things. Not only impressions, as in what art history teaches us, but rather motifs, sudden urges to project oneself here or there. It is all as much about the future of his drawings —and sometimes the sculpted form that accompanies them —as it is about the future of our dreams: when you become aware of them, they linger, but immediately thereafter they lose the mould that set them off ; what became animated can also come to a standstill. So to start moving again, one can only do one thing … draw, dream again.

I think that this adventure will take all of us further and further, and that, just like the boy from the tale who is guided by birds—unless we ourselves are birds as well— we will slowly discover new territories, new skies we previously lived without and which we henceforth will be unable to ignore. Perhaps that is where the similarity to the dream process would become apparent: this fleeting image, whether a scene or an almost film-like sequence, eludes us over and over. Acquiring the habit of writing down one’s dreams does not mean one takes away their motility, because committing them to a delicate medium does not interrupt the series but, rather, induces a new one, or several. Every new drawing brings forth a long line of new situations. And we go along with the artist. He’s the one guiding us from his watchtower turned bird. Brother Fabien, what is it you see? Ours is henceforward to wait for the horizon to open up ... and then we will see. And what we will see is beautiful, that much we can be sure of, even before having seen it.

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Bouture, 2014

Étude murmuration (2015)

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Fabien Mérelle Rencontre à l’imparfait…

Some dance to remember,

some dance to forget… (Eagles)

Kathy de Nève Essayist and art philosopher Like a child that can't stop playing and doesn't listen when it's called to come to the table. Some things never change.

His story starts as a child, with a line, the day he finds pleasure in drawing. Drawing will become his stage, his signature, a means of giving shape to the daily reality which he observes from the sidelines.

He learns to observe—to draw is to find. He constantly opens his eyes. Solitary, surrounded by everything that surrounds him, he will no longer do anything else.

Tours, summer of 2018. On the top floor of a terraced house that holds one of his workshops, the artist shows me the traces of the creative process—the arbitrary nature of choices, the fiction of perfection. Fabien Mérelle's aesthetic is one of completion (or the incomplete?). As Paul Valéry wrote, one cannot tell from looking at a work of art that it is finished; it is the image that speaks, not the author. To Fabien Mérelle, a work is never finished. A state of completion is boring, opposed to the truth, for life conjugates itself continuously: there was, there is, there will. The first thing an observer sees is a drawn image. What they should (be able to) see next is a line, the bearer of a time that is still far from completed.

Being curious about traces means being curious about life, about the world and about the birth of art and, therefore, images. There is no single underlying meaning that matches the intention of the artist or, in Valéry's words, the intention of the author. The observer tries to discover, to remove the layers: a sentence, a word or an image can always have several meanings.

Before us here appears an artist who cannot stop playing. To draw is to forge things. To draw is also to testify, to fight a battle against ever self-conjugating time. When Fabien Mérelle depicts something, it exists. Little abstraction. Little news. Nature, which includes man, offers him a range of possibilities. Whenever he decides to commit something to paper, he wants to render it as accurately as possible. He considers himself ‘the miniaturist of the everyday’, not in order to be true to real reality, but to circumvent that reality. Play is the essence of the whole process: making possible that which in essence is not possible, like in a dream image, going beyond reality in order to encounter one's own truth. The more complex the form, the more he will compel himself to depict it as truly as possible, even to the point of decadence.

This workshop—we are still on the top floor of his house in Tours —is where he most likes to work, surrounded by everything dear to him, his wife Estelle, and his children Laura and Samuel. Past, present, and future meet each other here, too. On the wall hangs a sepia portrait of a bearded Leonardo Da Vinci, the same portrait he would look at sitting at his parents' breakfast table. All around him are relics from his paternal grandfather: a spinning top, collages, a walking stick. He speaks about his grandfather with deep admiration, even awe, describing him as a farmer, a handyman and an inventor (he invented his own instruments). He recounts how he, little Fabien, would be impressed by the time his grandfather would take to manufacture something in his workshop, by the intensity and the surrender. Poems too. Says Fabien Mérelle: ‘To most people, he was just an ordinary man. To me, he was the artist I looked up to. He was Geppetto, and I was Pinocchio.’

Right next to the big work table is a smaller table for his daughter, Laura. The décor surrounding us feels like a staged scene. Something is definitely going on. A story that originates somewhere else and continues in here. The artist has staged himself here, both himself and daily life, with his cortège of joy, fears, and fantasies. Laura takes part in the show, like the typical child watching from behind the scenes, taking it all in. The small table, like an empty white top (or a beauty mark?), becomes her stage, where she can let herself go completely ... where she will learn to live. Here we see Mérelle as a father and a mentor, as an actor and a poet, or acting as such ... The poetry lies in the proximity, in the white spaces between the words. We imagine ‘la Laura de Mérelle’, barely seven years old, adopting the role of signifier, of designator. Completely on her own and without any fear she will, just like her father, confront herself with what Picasso, from his experience as a draughtsman, considered the most difficult thing: the line.

Fabien Mérelle loves the 'moment of doing', and he likes to make it last. It is the moment when he can be completely himself. Focused on the paper, he becomes the line he is drawing; he dwells in the vibration of the model, in the darkness of the shadows. He thought he would be able to control his subjects, but it is they who lead the dance: the drawing frames him, anchors him in the present, not the other way around. And while we understand that he is (now) talking to us as a masked man, when he is in the intimacy of marriage

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Verde que te quiero verde, 2019

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120

Histoire Naturelle, 2011

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Authors: Kathy de Nève & François Michaud Translation: Xavier De Jonge & Anne-Laure Vignaux Graphic design: Denis Decaluwé Cover: Bouture, 2014 If you have any questions or comments about the material in this book, please do not hesitate to contact our editorial team: redactiekunst@lannoo.com. © Fabien Mérelle, 2019 © Keteleer Gallery, Pourbusstraat 3/5, 2000 Antwerpen, 2019 © Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2019 D/2019/45/25 – NUR 642 ISBN: 978 94 014 5792 7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

K ETELEER