Mélina Bismuth questions the barriers between the outside and the inside worlds, public and intimate. She explores urban construction sites and their ephemeral “screens” - that protect and hide from view - through photographs of scaffold sheetings (series Rebuild) as well as shop windows blotted with white chalk (series Blank). Additional photographic series reseach other barriers such as windows and their reflections (Both Sides Now), broken windows of vandalized cars ((Witness) or tombstones (Boa Viagem).

 

Her artistic expression is rooted in the word «re-build». A long process of de-construction (fragmenting the subject in time and space through shootings over the years). Then a meaningful reconstruction: elaborately assembling photographs.

 

Her practice stretches space and time. The Rebuild series testifies of 6 years wandering through more than 40 cities (Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Barcelona, Bilbao, Porto, Berlin, Los Angeles…) thus collecting thousands of-photographs. Some artworks gather pictures collected over 5 years.

 

She is nurtured by the Japanese aesthetics of wabi-sabi, embracing the imperfect, valuatuing mundane objects that gradually deteriorate, get constrained, worn by time. Her photographs highlight textures, flaws, marks of use of the subject, the memory of a particular moment and light with its actual color (no retouch).

Her assembling process itself echoes the Japanese art of Kintsugi (repairing broken pottery by mending the parts with gold lacquer), though with endless combinations. A regeneration process through which all parts eventually find their own place to enhance the overall artwork. The «building» gesture is a dynamic process connecting parts by moving the positioning of each piece, which affects all pieces around. Each picture is carefully selected for its hues, textures, lines, shadows to bring consistency of links, fluidity or create ruptures between close images thus structuring the whole photo collage. 

Assembling is guided by the  «anima» (breath, soul). The rectilinear «grids» fade to give way to movements, curves, reliefs and light. She’s inspired by Vasarely’art of curving square modules, the richness of multi views and dimensions in Cubism and David Hockney’s photocollages.

Exactly as viewing through a rotating kaleidoscope, all artworks of a series are made of the same material (eg photographs of scaffold sheetings), but each one reflects a different structure, color, composition, movement, emotion. 

 

Her artworks offer a kinetic experience: the mise en abyme of hundreds of images in the image triggers the movement of the viewer. After a first glance at the overall artwork, the viewer approaches to discover dozens or hundreds of individual pictures, his eyes move from one to another one. As he steps back again, the vision of the whole takes another meaning.

The composition often offers a breakthrough, a perforation, a slit, a depth so that the gaze can cross, thus engaging the viewer to see beyond. A world of oppositions opens up. Painting or photography? fixed or animated work? masculine or feminine? strength or delicacy? deterioration or regeneration? noise or silence ? human presence or absence?