French artist Mélanie Berger to open exhibition in Été 78

Mélanie Berger will soon enfold the fantastic Été 78 in a stunning tangle of lines, layers, and paper lives. We visited the French artist at her studio in Greylight Projects, where she sets about her work with pencils and rubbers.

"Abstraction also starts with the real. It is not disconnected from the way you look at things. There is always a heaven, a certain quality of light, or a vibration that surround you and that may no longer be visible, but which do find their way into the construction.” It is that subtle state, that wafer-thin membrane between what you see and what you suspect, between what jumps out at you and what it elicits that makes Mélanie Berger’s work such an overwhelming experience.

The drawings by the French artist who moved to Brussels a year and a half ago, make tangles of lines and layers glow like skin. Skin that trembles, begs to be touched, turns away, tautens, and reveals wrinkles, scars, and birthmarks. A life in lines, features, swipes, depths, and erasures that fluctuates between the fundamental emotions in a human life and the urge to reign them in, to swaddle them in soft sobriety.

It is difficult not to be affected by Mélanie Berger’s drawings. They continue to draw themselves as you look at them, only to unravel and move in a different direction, like a dialogue driven by the generous, forgiving act that produced it in the first place. “I realised very quickly, while I was still studying, that drawing is the only medium that allowed me to be where I wanted to be: as though in a kind of reticence, a place where I could embrace uncertainty in a way, where I didn’t have to scream to make myself heard. I could do that in drawing because drawing is also about erasing.”

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Mélanie Berger’s practice is based on the interaction between appearing and disappearing. She uses her pencils to create stifling compositions in various colours, only to return to them and remove the layers with a rubber.

“It is a constant movement on the border between creating and decreating. I enjoy the ability to be engaged in an activity that vacillates and goes back and forth between speaking and erasing what has been spoken. Things can be expressed more accurately and correctly in this dynamic. Despite the fact that it is laborious work – adding a shade to the drawing that is then completely erased again – I do derive meaning from these completely contradictory actions.”

This layered interplay of lines reveals and conceals, constructs and deconstructs, and thus encapsulates its process, its act of creation…and time itself. “I am especially interested in preserving the underlying traces and making the process shine through. My work is the result of that research, the attempt to find the border where a drawing is an image, but also a field that is as open as possible and allows you to feel what happened before it got to that stage."

"For a brief time, I made animated films based on my drawings, which at that time were still forms that transformed, and I made the films precisely to document this process. But it was too confining because I was not able to translate the layers into the films. I wanted to detach myself from representation so that the image became more of a journey, through stories and strata, rather than an object.”

Draw the line
Mélanie Berger takes this fascinating journey from her studio on the top floor of Greylight Projects, the independent, artist-run residence and project space close to the Botanique. “Brussels has become famous for these kinds of independent creative places. It is a definite advantage that you can jump right into the dynamism of a network when you first arrive in the city. And combined with this space where I can isolate myself completely, it is absolutely my dream studio."

"I need a time-space that is completely isolated and outside the world. My work requires a slow sort of concentration that takes me a long time to get into. That concentration is necessary because this is very physical work that also goes very fast. It is an empirical process, I have to be able to react to what is happening. It is a struggle sometimes, from the very first lines that I draw and all the other ones that feed off them.”

Mélanie Berger literally dives into her drawings. “I always work on the floor because it allows me to be completely immersed in my work. I have noticed that when I work standing up, everything goes more slowly because the eye primarily seeks to control things and suggests elements that do not necessarily contribute to openness. And openness is absolutely essential to me."

"Perhaps that is why I rarely frame my work. I feel as though I am burying it. Completely open and exposed, there is always the possibility of returning to it, sometimes even a year later. Perhaps because they said too much and were too focused on a specific result. I need to give them space and life.”

“My drawings unfold in and over time, but they do start as a spontaneous gesture. That is why I love delineating the drawings with tape. Within those constraints, which create a kind of playground, everything can develop more organically.” That is also true of the line that seems to be oriented to disappearance itself.

“But erasing might also be a way of finding them. [Laughs] In my early work I used to see the line as both an expression of pure energy and the beginning of a possible world. Now I consider it more as a constitute element of the whole. Like the universe, really, or the human person. We are all composite wholes made of cells. The line is the elementary part of a complex world, that which allows me to create. It is a form, an individuality, a movement, something that gives life.”

> Mélanie Berger. 11/06 > 25/06 (opening 10/06, 16.00 > 20.00), Été 78, Elsene