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Mélanie Désourdy

I create fragmented images that, together, form a single whole universe. I decompose the subject to create a new one. Color and non-figurative composition are integral parts of my work. It is a formal work on color, but also a fictional space where elements are suggested to evoke landscape, whether urban or rural.

Painting: I include drawing in my paintings; it is minimal, clumsy and precise all at once. The drawn line, generally straight, supports color to structure the painting, it accentuates the contrast between flat and modulated. The pencil is used as a frontier between vibrant colors and fragile lines that enclose small imaginary worlds. The viewer looks at a Hard-Edged colored space punctuated by tangled color miniatures. Disorder and precision meet.

I create a mise en abyme. The large canvas could be split into several smaller images. I paint an image formed of the same subject repeatedly. One can focus on one detail, but also look at it as a whole.

Photomontage: I'm doing photography with the eyes of a painter. I fragment my subjects to create pictures of reality captured on film or digital media. I make a pictorial image from the photographic medium. Although I use a digital camera, scanning and Photoshop, I did not make tabula rasa of the old analog photography. The manual selection of photos, as well as the time spent cutting and matching each images are present in my work: the viewer cannot ignore the traditional character of the process, which appear in my interventions. I like the imperfect cutting of the x-acto, it not only shows the stages of the work, but questions and draws the viewer to the photomontage.

With my reinvented landscapes I want to create an image formed of the same subject repeatedly, which combines several different realities that form a cohesive unit. We look at a landscape, then approach and see that it is composed of many places. I want to oppose and relate distinct vegetation, urban and rural, images of everyday life and grandiose.

In both cases I discuss the reading of the work in relation to its format and its medium. How do we approach a piece of art when it is horizontal or vertical, panoramic, circular, large or miniature?  Does the viewer move to understand the work? Do we embrace the landscape at once? Can  we go around it? Are we part of it or we just contemplate what is before us? Where is the limit?