texts / catalogues

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"CHAMPION ROBERT LE DIABLE (5556)"  Mélina Avouac

In French, consommer means at once to consume and to consummate. Speaking linguistically, to consume something as a consumer, also implies that one finishes, completes or perfects the product - that one makes the union between production and consumption complete through an intercourse.
Our definitions have slipped along with our reality - anything can be produced, therefore anything can be consumed. The internet as a tireless machine of pluralistic and endless production that lets flow a public flood of images. Sight is vulnerable. Target the eyes. They will consume faster than mouths.

And so Mélina Avouac intercepts here, between the circuit of production-consumption, and allows a third function to regain and transcend its power: recording. Like a bricoleur who makes use of only what is at hand, she pulls digital information down from it's intangible realm and gives it form again, imprisoning it in the physical realm from which it had once escaped.
Continuing her cycle of drawings that the artist had begun some years ago, she now adds large-scale charcoal drawings to this cauldron. Though a trained sculptor and a self-labelled conceptual artist, the skills of a drawer are exhibited here through brushstroke-like structures, concentrated and distributed layers of charcoal and untouched white borders and surfaces.
So rather than consuming blindly, Avouac consummates these hand-picked signs and images by giving them a more private singularity within a contextualised series/plane, and, so, seeks to finish, complete and perfect them. Rather than letting them drown in a sea of information, she seeks to make their union with us complete through artistic intercourse...

As if Avouac were at work constructing and adding to her own plane; a plane of rhizomatic connections where everything can be connected to everything, where depth and height are replaced by surface and breadth (a plane of consistency?), a plane that does not allow for hierarchy. Transcendence would only be a product of this plane. A plane of immanence? A schizophrenic's table... "Once noticed, it continued to occupy one's mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going about its own business...The striking thing was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or intentionally complex, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been desimplified in the course of its carpentering... As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as 'overstuffed,' and if finished it was only in so far as there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table... It was not intended for any specific purpose, for anything one expects of a table." (Henri Michaux)
‹ Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari „Anti-Oedipus“/ Lévi-Stauss „The Savage Mind“ ›

Kenneth Maennchen, Düsseldorf 2012


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"La vie en noir" Mélina Avouac

Even today you might find him in urbane, metropolitan places, in Paris, London or Berlin: the flâneur. The flâneur, as the dictionary would define him (from the French verb flâner), is someone who idly strolls.

He certainly doesn’t progress, as the flâneur knows neither destination nor haste.

In the literature of the fin de siècle we are to believe la flânerie is a singular phenomenon, tied to a certain aesthetic and economic condition in the urbane life of the late 19^th century.

Like his literary Doppelgänger, the electronic flâneur is an extroverted person differing from his counterpart in one way: the rambling through virtual realms of cyberspace is no longer a dive into the urbane landscape; it is rather the increase of individual possibilities to select from inexhaustible visual prospects.

Mélina Avouac (born 1982) deciphers the appearance of the internet in its architecture, its symbolism and its icons.

The related theory “L’empire des signes” was written by Roland Barthes: on a journey to Japan Barthes became familiar with world of Japanese signs and created a response to the foreign, pleasing the flâneur, for he is able to shield himself in the realms of an unknown language.

The Japanese sign is empty: its signifié is ephemeral; there is no god, no truth and no morals that form the foundation of these signifiants. Furthermore the aesthetic quality of this sign, the beauty of its outlook and the erotic magic in its appearance are omnipresent amongst the most trivial figures and gestures, which we usually dismiss as unimportant and irrelevant.

By transferring seemingly incoherent images and text into a serial order, Mélina Aouac declaims an “Exchange of opaqueness” and develops with recourse to digital found footage a “semiotic of the visual” in a post-economical method of production.

Her circles of pictures, composed of uncountable, compound drawings put the viewer into a universe of the most different quotations and fragments of today’s reality in the media; from Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling in Tarantino’s Grindhouse to an acquirement of drawing of the delicate portraits of youth by John Singer Sargent, or working with explicit pornographic material. Her work is about the digital pool, the archive of ephemerally perceived images and signs. All this shows the conditions of Avouac’s artistic acquirement of images.

Christian Schoeler, Düsseldorf 2010

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