Artists in residence

Robin van Leijsen is a fine artist based in The Netherlands.
 

As an multidisciplinary maker, Robin creates magical realistic and playful works. In these works, they touch upon themes as nostalgia, family, gender, identity, and behavioral patterns. Robin started as a painter, mostly painting self-portraits as a way of introspection. Over the years Robin started experimenting with more materials, and discovered their love for woodworking, ceramics, collaging, and video-making. 

Humour plays a big part in Robin’s works, this they achieve through colour use, distortion, and playing with size differences. This way the sensitive subjects, which root in things Robin experiences in times of change, have a protective, approachable layer. Besides this, their love for making, craftwork, shows in the final artwork

Adrien van Melle works fiction as a material in its own right, intertwining writing, photography, installation and video.

Since 2017, he creates and evolves characters thought as an extension of himself, like a tree of plastic possibilities that the artist does not wish to abandon or exclude. He then seizes them entirely in order to transform them into works of art and maintain their nature in the making. 

Through their biography, their intimacy and their sensitivity, his characters Gabriel Mayer and Jules Wouters become installations on a human scale, notably in the works Reproduction of Gabriel Mayer’s bedroom and Reproduction of Jules Wouters’ bedrooms. We explore their identity, their experiences and their perception by visiting their bedrooms, with their banal furniture, accompanied by images and autobiographical texts, imbued with everyday life. These installations are made up of many indexical, sometimes insignificant details that the viewer can choose to grasp or ignore.  

The latter thus plays a fundamentally active role by elaborating a new facet of the fiction proposed from the narrative fragments given to be seen and read. This proves all the more convincing in his work Séance (2017), where black images follow one another, whose format echoes the cinema screens, in the centre of which are read, in white characters, short texts halfway between narrative poetry and micro-fiction. The resulting mental projections then assert themselves as so many possible readings and images of reality.

The fictional narrative approached through the prism of multiplied subjectivities invites a constant redefinition of relational and identity certainties, by giving rise to a precious permeability between the visions and perceptions of individuals brought to reality.

Text by Licia Demuro for the 64th Salon de Montrouge

Laurie van Melle was born in 1993 in Lille. She graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2019 and lives and works in Paris.

Laurie van Melle’s works are at the crossroads of the domestic universe and abstraction. While familiar objects are always the starting point, these source motifs are systematically condensed into minimal schematic representations before being transposed into painting or volume. The result is works with clear, geometric forms, in which abstract vocabulary and figurative presence coexist.