Fotokino

We conclude the 2013 programming at the Studio Fotokino by gazing at the moon with an exhibition combining graphic design and painting.

First of all, let’s start from a very specific site: the Villa Medici, in Rome. Between April 2012 and March 2013, Fanette Mellier, graphic designer, was resident there. Her research was based on the Astronomicon, a poem written by Marcus Manilius, an astronomer and astrologer from ancient Rome. She collaborated with Emmanuel Van der Meulen, a painter who was also a Villa’s resident, on Cosmica Sidera, a joint project which is extended at the Studio.

Then, let’s dive into the void: Spaceland. An infinite place—the space, the sky—, sometimes filled with light, sometimes with darkness, but always glittering from the thousand fireflies that reach our eyes. A place, irremediably enigmatic, in which we are floating, slightly anxious. A wonderful playground for imagination and dreams.

This Spaceland is the starting point of this exhibition that brings together the plastic languages of Fanette Mellier and Emmanuel Van der Meulen around subjects that are first and foremost poetic: infinity, time, emptiness, night… But this undefined place also engages their respectives approaches in a reflection tied to their working tools, canvas, paper, pigments. What is the surface of the sky, its material? Its light, its colors, its depth, its transparency? And beyond any desire for representation, the exhibition can be transformed into a pure sensitive and visual experience for the visitor, confronted with mediums that play on formal (the rectangle of the poster or the canvas and the circle), material (ink, paint) and chromatic oppositions and complementarities. The cosmos then becomes the place for a dialogue between the technical means of graphic deisgn and painting, as well as with the immateriality of the viewer’s perception.